Trade Leaders Pledge World Pact in 1990 : U.S., Allies to Submit Rules for GATT Scrutiny

Top trade officials of the United States and its major economic allies, anxious about the pace of sweeping negotiations to overhaul the world’s outmoded trading system, launched a major push Sunday to instill new urgency into the talks to prevent them from bogging down.

At a weekend meeting here, the officials--representing the United States, Japan, the European Community and Canada--reaffirmed their intention to shepherd the negotiations to a close by the original late-1990 deadline, instead of allowing them to slip, as some countries have proposed.

They also pledged to place their individual proposals for changes in world trade rules on the table by the end of December to allow time for the 106-country negotiating group to address the broad array of issues.

Energizing the Talks

The move by the Big Four trade ministers was designed to breathe new life into the negotiations--which are known more formally as the Uruguay Round--in order to head off delaying tactics by smaller countries that ultimately could derail the effort to overhaul global trading rules.

Several of the senior trade officials participating in this weekend’s session in this tidy Dutch capital said the major challenge now will be to persuade the newly industrializing countries--such as Brazil, India and South Korea--to join in the necessary compromises as the late-1990 deadline approaches. The developing countries, which historically have maintained tight restrictions on trade and investment, have balked at the prospect of too sweeping a change in either sector.

After 2 1/2 years of preliminaries, the negotiations--launched in October, 1986, at Punta del Este, Uruguay, under the aegis of the Geneva-based General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade--are just entering the hard-bargaining stage.

A major goal of U.S. trade policy since the early 1980s, the negotiations are seeking to slash agricultural subsidies around the world and to extend world trading rules to things such as services, investment and intellectual property--patents, copyrights and trademarks--that have not been covered before.

By any measure, they constitute the most sweeping agenda for global trade negotiations ever attempted.

At a press conference here Sunday, trade ministers of the four major trading blocs expressed optimism about the talks, but decided that the industrialized nations would have to increase their pressure or the negotiations might well slip--possibly fatally--beyond the 1990 deadline.

Not Much Time Left

Frans Andriessen, the EC’s trade minister, told reporters that the industrial powers are increasingly aware that “not very much time has been left” to complete the negotiations. “We’re all agreed that we have to keep the momentum going, so that no one can get the impression that it can slip,” he added.

U.S. Trade Representative Carla A. Hills echoed those views. And Japan’s Vice Minister of Trade, Shigeo Muraoka, said the group had shown “strong political will” to push the talks forward.

Muraoka took an opportunity at a press conference following the two-day meeting to again berate the United States for using the new Omnibus Trade Act to threaten Japan with retaliation if it does not reduce alleged trade barriers involving forest products, super computers, and satellites.

Repeating Japan’s contention that the new Super 301 provision of that law--under which the United States acted May 25 when it cited Japan, India and Brazil for employing unfair trade practices--was illegal, he noted: “We should seriously question ourselves what would happen to the GATT if many other countries” follow the United States’ example.

Nevertheless, both U.S. and foreign officials said the Super 301 actions were not a major point of discussion at the meeting this weekend. The industrial nations already had formally rebuked Washington for using such threats at a meeting in Paris last week of the 24-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Work is going ahead to develop broad trade proposals to place on the negotiating table. The United States, for example, has said it will outline a new system for converting agricultural subsidies into tariffs, so they can be measured--and ultimately reduced--more easily.

Japan is working on a plan for deciding what country should be listed as the country-of-origin in cases where a product is assembled in several different parts of the world. Canada is drafting a new plan for reducing government subsidies for specific products. And the EC will propose new ways for countries to deal with cases in which domestic industries are hurt by unexpected surges of foreign imports.

The United States and its trading partners remained split on one procedural point--whether to design proposed reductions in tariffs and subsidies to apply equally across the board, or to negotiate them individually according to product category.