GENEVA, 25 October 2003 — The Kingdom was yesterday officially reported heading to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO) early next year.
The chairman of entry talks, which have dragged on for seven years, said the Kingdom was on track to wrap up entry negotiations by the end of this year and indicated it could be admitted to the currently 146-member WTO soon after.
Munir Akram, who heads the WTO working party guiding the talks, was speaking after two days of discussions in Geneva between key countries and a team headed by Hashim Yamani, Saudi minister of commerce and industry.
Together with Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia is among the largest economies still outside the global trade body, which was set up in 1995 to lower barriers to exchanges of goods and services among its members.
Saudi Arabia “is now on track to completion” and the working party should be able to hold “a very substantial meeting.... in the very early months of 2004,” said Akram, currently Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York.
During the two days of talks at WTO headquarters, Yamani said his country had now signed 16 bilateral agreements with the body’s members, including the European Union and Japan, although not yet with the United States.
But he hoped to have accords completed by the end of this year with all the countries which had sought them before they would approve Kingdom’s entry. Trade sources said Yamani had told the session his government’s original “negative list”, submitted in 2001, of service sectors to which foreign investment would remain barred even under a WTO entry accord, had been cut back.
