HC Deb 10 June 2004 vol 422 cc395-6
9. Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)

What progress is being made on the World Trade Organisation negotiations. [177761]

The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (Ms Patricia Hewitt)

WTO Ministers are working towards securing the framework agreements on the major elements of the Doha development agenda by the end of July. That will enable negotiations to resume and to progress at a faster rate.

Tony Baldry

I thank the Secretary of State for that answer. If that happens, it will be very good news. There is a sense that the momentum has gone out of the process, although that may simply be because we have not heard much about it publicly. However, there is a suspicion that everything is being adjourned until after the American presidential elections, so it would help the House if the Secretary of State indicated where she thinks things are in relation to the discussions on agriculture, because there has been a lot of low-level snarling between the EU and the United States. Have the Singapore issues finally been dropped? Given all the promises made at Cancun, it would be helpful if she could assure the House that there is still the same momentum and that the same importance is accorded to the issues as at that time.

Ms Hewitt

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for being in the House to give me precisely that opportunity. Earlier this year, I shared his concern that the negotiations had run into the ground and that nothing would happen until after the end of this year, with the transition to a new United States Administration and a new European Commission. I am glad to say that those fears proved unfounded; both Commissioner Pascal Lamy and Ambassador Zoellick have made it very clear that they want to get the framework agreement in place before the end of July and that, because of those other factors, it must be in place before the end of July.

The joint letter that Commissioners Lamy and Fischler sent on 9 May to all WTO members represented a significant step forward. It reassured, in particular, developing countries about the willingness of the European Union to negotiate an end date to all agricultural export subsidies, provided of course there is parallelism in the approach of other developed countries on equivalent support for agricultural exports. The letter also made it clear that although we, and indeed most others, would like to proceed with negotiations on trade facilitation, the other Singapore issues can be dealt with differently and need not form part of the single undertaking or the round as a whole. Although the framework is not yet in place, the work being done in Geneva and the discussions between Ministers and negotiators around the world is leading all of us who are utterly committed to the Doha round to be more optimistic about the prospect of that interim agreement by the end of July.

Mr. John Grogan (Selby) (Lab)

What measures is my right hon. Friend taking to encourage capacity-building among developing nations, so that when the talks resume they will be more equal partners in the negotiations?

Ms Hewitt

My hon. Friend raises an important point. The British Government, especially the Department for International Development, have been at the forefront of supporting, and indeed putting money into, capacity-building efforts, both directly with developing countries and through the WTO. That is one of the reasons—not the only one—why the voice of developing countries was so much stronger at the Cancun meeting last September, despite, all the other difficulties we experienced there, than it had been before. We shall continue that very important work.

Mr. James Arbuthnot (North-East Hampshire) (Con)

We know that trade is more important than aid in helping developing countries to develop, but has the Secretary of State considered why it is that under the Government British trade has run into such difficulties? Why did yesterday's trade figures show another decline—£3.7 billion? The trade deficit under the Labour Government is the worst since records began 300 years ago. Why is that?

Ms Hewitt

The right hon. Gentleman does not seem to have noticed that the downturn in economic growth in almost all our trading partners over some years has inevitably had an impact on UK exporters, nor that the British economy has been growing steadily every quarter for the last seven years and indeed is enjoying its longest period of uninterrupted growth for more than 200 years—I think that is what the Chancellor said most recently; the Financial Times suggested this week that it may be the longest in all human history—and because of that it is inevitable that at the moment we are importing significantly more than we are exporting. But with resumed growth, especially in the United States, and with very strong growth in China, India and other Asian countries, British companies exporting to those markets are doing extremely well. As and when growth resumes in our major continental trading partners, I have no doubt at all that that deficit will shrink again.