Yes, it has been a real challenge getting at non-tariff barriers in the WTO, and partly just because of the extremely technical nature of those issues among 149, about to be 150, members of the organization.
I think Monsieur Cardin referred to differing levels of development among our trading partners. To take many of these technical issues into a negotiating context with many of the smaller developing countries is quite a challenge.
So there is an effort in the Doha Round to address non-tariff barriers. It was specifically identified in the non-agriculture market access negotiations. In that negotiation we spent the first three years just on the identification of issues and then on trying to place those issues in appropriate negotiating groups where some real progress could be made in developing disciplines to deal with them.
I think the most progress has been made in the area of trade facilitation, that is, at the border and leading right to the border: customs barriers beyond the tariff itself, administrative costs, internal transportation costs, the availability of internal transportation, making trade flow. Quite a bit of work has been done, and it requires a tremendous amount of technical assistance, because for most of these smaller countries the real barrier is that they don't have the resources to be able to provide the service. They would like to. They would like to be more involved in trade; they don't have the resources. So there's a huge technical assistance capacity building.
Specifically on agricultural non-tariff barriers, we made a decision before going into the Doha mandate that we did not see the prospect for making gains in TBT and SPS from the agreements we had from the Uruguay Round, because they were already under attack, again mostly from developing countries that actually wanted to lower the standards because they couldn't meet them. So those agreements are not part of the WTO negotiating mandate, and that was for a very tactical reason.