Some details emerge of Azerbaijan-WTO talks

  26 August 2016    Read: 1658
Some details emerge of Azerbaijan-WTO talks
Azerbaijan`s foreign trade regime was discussed at the Geneva meeting of the working party on the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in July this year, Deputy Foreign Minister Mahmud Mammad-Guliyev told on Friday.
“The process is underway of preparing documents on what obligations we have to undertake,” said the deputy FM. “The meeting was quite active. There were lots of questions from both the U.S. and the EU. For the time being, we’re expecting their letters in the form of letter.”

According to him, the next stage of talks depends on when the concerned agencies answer those questions. We will make our own corrections.

“I don’t think we’re going to be ready for the working party’s next meeting sooner than mid-2017,” Mammad-Guliyev added.

He noted that bilateral talks on agriculture as the second priority.

The deputy FM continued: “We’ve presented to them a new schedule covering 2013-15. There haven’t been any special discussions on the schedule. Questions in large part have to do with our proposals about support for agriculture. We think we can spend 10 percent of the GDP on agriculture. WTO agrees to 5 percent only, while they have given Kazakhstan 8.5 percent. Nevertheless, we’ll continue insisting on this issue. We now want from them a billion euros to support agriculture and another billion euros to restore the agriculture of those territories after the occupation comes to an end.”

Azerbaijan had bilateral talks with Kazakhstan too, and discussions are underway with Russia and Saudi Arabia as part of previous talks, Mammad-Guliyev added.

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