5 June 2008

Press Conference

with Director-General of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy*
Australian Embassy, Paris

Thank you very much. I am Simon Crean, the Trade Minister from Australia, and Australia chairs the Cairns Group, an important grouping within the WTO, and we have taken the opportunity today to chair here in the Australian Embassy an informal meeting of those Trade Ministers that were here at the OECD meeting.

I think that over the last week there has been some strong political engagement which has given important impetus, I believe, to moving us in the direction of hopefully concluding the Doha Round. Last weekend in Arequipa, the APEC Ministers Responsible for Trade met and came forward with a very strong resolution urging an expeditious resolution of the Doha round. Over the last couple of days there has also been meetings here in Paris at the OECD Ministerial level and important statements and commitments there also made in the context of concluding it.

Recently of course, there’s been the FAO meeting in Rome to deal with the food crisis and an important dimension of the solution to that crisis also has involved the call for the opening of agricultural markets.

The discussions today were excellent. The Ministers’ political will that I talked of before clearly was on show, that’s not to say that there are not still considerable areas of disagreement, but what did emerge from today’s meeting was an agreement to direct officials to engage intensively in Geneva over coming weeks, with an objective of working towards a Ministerial meeting in Geneva around the end of the month.

There was very fruitful and very effective exchange today and over the last couple of days on the work that remains to be done, particularly in industrial goods, but also in agriculture. For Australia, in addition to agriculture and industrial products, we’re also looking for good results on the services negotiations which will be convened at the time the Ministerial meeting is convened.

So we’re not here today to announce the conclusion of the round, we are here to announce that there has been an important statement of political will to conclude the round. We are not here to pretend that there aren’t still difficulties remaining. The task ahead of us still remains daunting but there is the very strong view that the task is also doable. The decision today was really an instruction from the Ministers themselves for a commitment from their officials to

engage intensively over coming weeks and we will be keeping in constant contact with the direction and progress of those negotiations.

Journalist: Is there any one particular breakthrough in the last few days that makes it possible to hold this Ministerial meeting at the end of the month?

Mr Crean: I think the point I made before is that, the breakthrough is that, we had the opportunity over the course of the last week to engage at the political level on a number of occasions. The breakthrough is the realisation that, as difficult as the task is, it still remains that political will in the end is going to determine if we are going to get an outcome or not. And despite the difficulties and despite the issues that have to be resolved, the conclusion that came from today’s informal meeting -- and it can’t bind anyone per se, (though) it was an important gathering of people -- the important decision was not just a reaffirmation of that political will, but a determination to give effect to it by supporting and instructing senior officials to take part in an intensified round of negotiations to seek to narrow the areas that can be put before Ministers before the end of the month. Now, no dates have been set, so don’t read that into it, but a process has been put in train backed by the strength of a political commitment. Given the progress that has been made in the past week because of that political injection, I think I would say that’s the importance that’s come out, and it has been confirmed or consolidated, if you like, as a result of today’s discussion.

Journalist: Given the long duration that it takes for coming to some kind of understanding, which is still far from complete, on special products in agriculture, how long do you want it to take to resolve all the problems in NAMA?

Mr Crean: Well, it’s true that there’s been a lot more engagement on agriculture and in my view there’s been more progress made in the agriculture negotiations. That same level of engagement has not occurred in NAMA. NAMA, whilst it has its own difficulties, isn’t, in terms of the architecture, as complex, again in my view, as the agriculture negotiations. That said, there are still a lot of outstanding issues in both areas. But I think the success in agriculture of engaging intensively has been demonstrated by the recently produced text on agriculture, demonstrating a significant narrowing of the points of difference. The same thing hasn’t happened with NAMA, that’s why we’ve said it’s not just a question of engaging intensively on that, as Pascal says, in the end we’ve got to get the balance right between what’s being done in agriculture and what’s being done in NAMA. We don’t want to put specific dates, then the date becomes the issue. But what has occurred today is a realisation of the need to intensify the effort, a determination by the Ministers to keep engaged in the process that seeks to bring about a mechanism by which we can conclude the Round.

*Please note Mr Lamy’s comments have not been included in this transcript

ENDS

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