The WTO Conference result satisfactory basis for future negotiations

Press release 392/2005
18 December, 2005


The agreement reached offers an opportunity to carry the round of negotiations forward and serves as a reasonable basis for future work, Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Mari Kiviniemi pointed out at the end of the WTO Ministerial Conference on 18 December. Kiviniemi chaired the Finnish delegation in the conference held in Hong Kong on 13-18 December.

The discussions in the Ministerial Conference were dominated by the questions of development and export subsidies in agriculture. The EU succeeded in getting the industrialised countries to join an initiative, through which the products from the least-developed countries are granted duty-free and quota-free access to the markets of industrialised countries.

As far as the schedule for ending export subsidies for agriculture is concerned, a decision was made according to which all forms of export subsidies will be eliminated simultaneously by the year 2013. For the EU, the execution of this reform is possible within the framework of the already agreed CAP reform.

As concerns the goals Finland and the EU had for the negotiations, the final result can be considered satisfactory. According to Minister Kiviniemi, in the future progress has to be made particularly in the negotiations about trade in services and industrial products. Kiviniemi preferred to describe the results of the Ministerial Conference modest rather than ambitious.

The WTO negotiations will continue in Geneva so that by the end of April 2006 the WTO is supposed to reach an agreement about, for instance, the details concerning market access of agricultural and industrial products. The goal is to have the negotiation round closed by the end of 2006.

Additional information: Director Matti Lassila, Unit for the EC Common Commercial Policy, gsm +358 40 708 6891

Statement by Minister Kiviniemi