Amendment 1665 threatens the Doha Development Agenda
WASHINGTON, DC – In a letter to the U.S. Senate leadership, the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) urged opposition to an amendment by Senator Dorgan (D-ND), Amendment No. 1665 to H.R. 2862, the Commerce, State, Justice FY2006 Appropriations Bill. The letter, which was endorsed by other leading U.S. business organizations, stated that the Dorgan Amendment would undermine U.S. interests in the Doha Round by taking certain issues off the negotiating table.
“The Dorgan Amendment would harm, if not doom, our efforts to negotiate an ambitious and commercially meaningful outcome to the Doha Round. We cannot expect other nations to liberalize trade if we take important issues off the table,” said Mary Irace, NFTC Vice President for Trade and Export Finance. “We have an enormous stake in the Doha Round negotiations. With a critically important WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong less than three months away, we should not condemn the trade negotiations to mediocrity or failure, which is what the Dorgan Amendment would do if it passed,” Irace added.
According to NFTC, many U.S. exporters have offensive interests in improving trade rules in other countries where they are increasingly faced with unfair trade law actions against them. “The NFTC has consistently supported a comprehensive and ambitious Doha Round and we believe the Dorgan Amendment would make that impossible,” said Irace. Referring to the Trade Act of 2002, she added that, “the issues raised in the Amendment have already been debated by Congress and U.S. negotiators have been given clear objectives. This type of measure would be a hindrance, not a help, to meeting those objectives.”
