WTO Accession from the Perspective of WTO Members: The View from the Other Side of the Table

Abstract

This paper has been prepared for Islamic Development Bank's Seminar on WTO Accession Issues for selected OIC Member Countries, taking place on 28 -29 March 2006, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It offers a detour from well-trodden ground of WTO accession procedures and challenges acceding countries face throughout their accession negotiations, and instead focuses on WTO accession process from point of view of those on other side of table, namely WTO Members. This paper offers a welcome opportunity to view WTO accession process from this perspective and attempts to give the other side of story.WTO accession as an issue has traditionally and indeed still continues to take a back seat to other fields of activity within WTO, which tend to attract more attention from Members as well as grabbing more headlines in media.1 These include WTO dispute settlement, as well as on-going multilateral trade negotiations within struggling Doha Round. It perhaps for this reason that WTO accession as an issue tends to attract only a handful of Members who take a consistent and systemic interest in topic.This paper divided into two sections. Section One discusses different kinds of issues which Members pursue during negotiations of acceding countries and makes an intellectual distinction between: 1) market access issues; 2) systemic issues, and; 3) non trade-related issues. Section Two looks at some of issues which come up in particular, under two different sectors, namely trade in agriculture and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights.What interesting that different Members seem to have their own different pet issues on which they will invariably take a firm and committed stance. Also interesting fact that when two neighboring countries are negotiating with one another, one as a Member and other as an applicant, Member can sometimes be relied upon to make a whole series of bilateral trade issues part of multilateral accession process, thereby capitalizing on its brief negotiating leverage. Finally, there seems to be a consensus that once bilateral deals have been completed with few major players, accession negotiations tend to become a matter of dotting is and crossing ts, although, again, this strategy can also come unraveled in face of a recalcitrant Member who has chosen to take a tough and committed stance on a particular issue.