Lesotho hosts trade ministers

This will include how to move the WTO trade agenda forward, particularly on issues such as market access, services and special and differential treatment available to LDCs. The expected outcome will be a Ministerial Declaration, which will be discussed with development partners on Friday, 29 February.

The meeting will also be attended by the Director General of the World Trade Organisation, Pascal Lamy, as well as his deputy, Valentine Rugwabiza, European Union Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, other officials of the WTO, and diplomats from Britain, the US, South Africa and India, among others.

Discussions at the meeting will centre on issues considered to be vital to the advancement of LDCs, and which are on the agenda of the Doha development round of multilateral trade negotiations. The holding of the LDC Ministerial will put the LDCs in a strong position to co-ordinate and advance their positions at the next WTO Ministerial Conference, which, at the recent Davos meeting, it was suggested should be held in the next few months.

LDC countries feel they have been consistently marginalised from the multilateral trading system and would like to use the conference to see how they can secure more benefits from the system, particularly in terms of improved market access.

The objective of the Maseru meeting is to discuss these issues with a view to strengthening LDCs' position in the global trading system. The WTO membership has committed to placing the needs and interests of LDCs at the heart of the Doha Development Agenda negotiations.

LDC Ministers of Trade last met in Livingstone in May 2005 to prepare for the Sixth WTO Ministerial Conference, which was held in Hong Kong, China, in December 2005.

Slow progress

Since the Livingstone and Hong Kong Ministerial meetings, there have been some developments in the Doha Development Agenda negotiations. However, after months of slow progress, negotiations were suspended in July 2006. Since then, there has been some momentum to get talks back on track.

However, delays in getting negotiators together, turnover of trade ministers involved in previous negotiations and several other issues affecting the consolidation of the LDC position has necessitated a new meeting of ministers to synchronise their views on the negotiations.

The Lesotho meeting is expected to be the vehicle for re-energising the LDC process.

The meeting will also be an opportunity for Geneva-based negotiators to confer with their Principals collectively, to report, to interface and to get a renewed mandate.

The issues on the table are in line with LDC Ministers' Declarations adopted at the Zanzibar meeting in 2001, Dhaka (India) in 2003, Dakar (Senegal) in 2004 and Livingstone (Zambia) in 2005.

These include:

• Duty-free and Quota-free Market Access
• Agriculture
• Cotton
• Non-agricultural market access
• Preference erosion
• Services
• Trade Facilitation
• TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights)
• LDC Accessions to the WTO
• Special and Differential Treatment Provisions
• WTO Rules