Written by Hajira Amla | From Seychelles News Agency
The Seychelles’ Ministry of Finance, Trade and Investment says that the Indian Ocean archipelago has made significant progress in its efforts to join the World Trade Organization (WTO), an international inter-governmental body that oversees the global rules of trade between nations and is set to meet its target of acceding to the WTO by the end of 2014.
According to a press statement from the WTO, Seychelles’ Minister of Finance, Trade and Investment, Pierre Laporte said a great deal had been accomplished since the Seychelles’ WTO Accession Working Party last met in November 2013.
Speaking at Seychelles’ sixth Working Party meeting in Geneva, Switzerland last week, the minister detailed several domestic policy and legislative reforms that Seychelles has already enacted to meet its WTO accession requirements, including legislation that would impose stricter sanitary controls on food, animal and plant trade, as well as laws relating to the protection of copyright and industrial property.
“Undertaking these reforms presented a particularly strong challenge for Seychelles, as a small and vulnerable island state, and also one of the ‘smallest’ trying to accede to the WTO,” said Laporte. “But we have made significant movement during the last few years, which is bringing our trade regime to the required level of competence and global integration.”
Seychelles has now completed bilateral trade negotiations with eight of the nine WTO members that requested talks via Seychelles’ working party (Canada, the European Union, Japan, Mauritius, Oman, South Africa, Switzerland and Thailand), and negotiations with the final member, United States, are reportedly nearing conclusion.
The chairperson of the Working Party, Hilda Ali Al-Hinai, called on Seychelles to update and submit a final version of its legislative action plan and asked Seychelles and the US to conclude the last outstanding bilateral trade negotiations as soon as possible.
Read more at Seychelles News Agency
