Malcolm McKinnon with Roeland vanBockel (EU Commission) and Paul E. Douglas (Metropolitan Police) at BIFA’s Annual Conference
News of the collapse of the WTO Doha Round trade talks came just as we went to press. Since the negotiations on a WTO trade facilitation agreement are SITPRO's highest business priority, this has been a great disappointment to us. While we have seen the immediate reactions to the declaration of a suspension of negotiations, by the WTO Director General Pascal Lamy, with some Ministers suggesting a delay of months or even years, we hope that as the dust settles WTO countries will realise what they are missing out on and come back quickly to the negotiating table so that negotiations can resume.
For SITPRO, we continue to set great store by a WTO trade facilitation agreement, which we believe offers a win-win for all WTO Member countries, but especially for developing countries. While we welcome Peter Mandelson's call for negotiations to continue on a development package that includes trade facilitation, we obviously hope that it will still be possible to make progress on the Doha Round as a whole.
However, the WTO is not SITPRO's only preoccupation. Other changes continue to challenge traders. We feature three in this issue. The revision of UCP 500 will be one of the most radical in the 73 year history of the ICC's trade document rules and it is important that traders keep up with the changes. Procedures for becoming an Authorised Economic Operator (AEO) continue to raise concerns as to whether the criteria and conditions will become so complex as to outweigh any benefits, which are difficult enough to identify. And governments including our own continue to look to border measures as a mechanism for enforcing controls on movement of goods in the interest of addressing security. In this latter regard, I was delighted to be asked to chair BIFA's Annual Conference, which was devoted to the security theme.
Return to SITPRO News: Issue 57, Summer 2006
