Financial Times

Consumer groups sound alarm over WTO services talks, warn of higher charges
By Duruthu Edirimuni in Hong Kong
Consumer groups have raised the alarm over what they call ‘backroom dealings’ around World Trade organisation (WTO) talks on services which they fear could allow private services providers to dictate charges on consumers.
The talks took place in Hong Kong last week, marked by anti-WTO demonstrations that mirrored protests in Colombo, but appear to have made little headway in opening up world trade because of entrenched positions and intransigence by industrialized nations.

Farmers and other groups staged protests against agricultural policies and practices of industrialised nations and Western multinationals that harm their livelihoods in Colombo to coincide with the WTO talks in Hong Kong.
On Wednesday, the first full day of the conference, African cotton farmers came in colourful costumes and handed out small cloth purses full of cotton, as they pressed their case for better access to Western markets.
Consumers International (CI), grouping consumer outfits campaigning for consumer rights, warned in Hong Kong that ‘backroom dealings’ over Annex C of the draft text on services, which stipulates the right to domestic regulation, could hurt consumers.

CI officials said that the removal of this right to regulate will result in private services providers dictating the standards and charges they impose on consumers. Director General CI, Richard Lloyd told The Sunday Times FT that it was critical to get a services agreement that benefits developing world consumers. Governments should have the right to regulate and create the conditions for consumer protection in services, he maintained.

Samuel Ochieng, CI’s head of delegation, said that needs of consumers in the developed world for quality goods, such as textiles, at affordable prices, could be met by their governments offering immediate quota-free, duty-free market access.

“The world’s consumers know what they want from trade and they are greater access to services, better and cheaper goods and more information about the products they are buying. Consumers make markets work and we want the WTO member governments to break the deadlock by putting the consumer agenda at the heart of these trade negotiations,” he said.

The cotton farmers are now at the centre of a row between the United States and the European Union over whether to make help for the very poorest countries the next stage in the trade round. They say that they are losing $400 million a year because of unfair U.S. cotton subsidies,but the United States says that any deal must be done as part of a comprehensive agricultural settlement.

BBC reported that the world trade talks in the Hong Kong Convention Centre were a somewhat “surreal” affair with official speeches taking place in the grand hall while the “real” negotiations went on behind closed doors and reported in hurried conversations in corridors.

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