Negotiations on Saudi Arabia’s bid for membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are almost complete, after talks in Geneva which ended yesterday. Observers now expect the Kingdom to join the Organization as early as the middle of the year.
During the two days of meetings, the Kingdom signed bilateral agreements with Canada, Switzerland, Norway, Thailand, Ecuador, Cuba, Sri Lanka and Poland. The Kingdom is also due to sign an agreement with India later today, according to Fawaz Al-Alamy, Deputy Minister of Commerce and Industry for Technical Affairs and Head of the Saudi technical team negotiating the country’s membership bid. He told Arab News that India’s team yesterday confirmed that they would go ahead with the agreement, which will bring to 30 the total of WTO members with which the Kingdom has signed agreements on trade in goods and services. Such agreements are a prerequisite before Saudi membership of the WTO can be approved.
Negotiations with just five countries – China, Panama, Indonesia, the Philippines and the United States - now need to be finalized. Al-Alamy said that he expected agreements to be signed with four of those countries in the forthcoming two weeks, and that he anticipated just one more round of negotiations with the United States, with which negotiations on multilateral issues are more or less complete.
Responding to comments on the way the negotiation process had speeded up over the past eight months, the Deputy Minister said that this was primarily due to economic reforms initiated by Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, the Deputy Premier and Commander of the National Guard. The reforms really helped move the negotiations forward, he said.
After a meeting of the WTO working party studying the Kingdom’s bid for entry into the 146-member body, diplomats and officials said that there was a clear mood among current WTO countries to complete the discussions, which must produce detailed agreements on the terms under which Saudi Arabia will be allowed to join, as quickly as possible.
The Chairman of the working party, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York Munir Akram, told other envoys at the close of its meetings on Wednesday that the process “is now approaching its final stages,” trade sources said. The target was to conclude negotiations by the middle of the year, perhaps before the (northern hemisphere) holiday season,” Akram added. The group is to hold its next meeting in two months.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, Russia and Ukraine are the three largest economies that have yet to be admitted to the WTO. All three began negotiations to do so in the mid-1990s.
The Minister of Commerce and Industry, Hashim Yamani, said that he was optimistic that the remaining agreements could be completed soon. “The few gaps that remain are narrowing,” he said. The Minister said that the Kingdom had finalized many of the requirements for economic reform and the restructuring of Saudi public enterprises, and had issued many laws and regulations related to WTO agreements, including intellectual property laws, import licenses, health measures, customs, and the technical obstacles facing trade. The Kingdom has also paved the way for foreign investment by establishing the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA), reducing tax on corporate profits from 45 to 20%, and providing other incentives.
Source: SPA
