The negotiations are in a very difficult situation and we have a very short time to reach agreement on some very major items, starting with agriculture and NAMA, because we didn't meet the Hong Kong deadlines for agreement on the modalities that would be the basis on which those negotiations could be concluded in detail—the formula reductions, and the terms of export subsidy elimination, in the case of agriculture.
So we have been, and still are, in a period of intensive and continuous negotiation in those two areas, which will continue through next week, at which time the chairs of those two negotiating groups are to submit texts, taking the decisions on modalities as far as they can. It is expected, and the director general of the WTO has suggested, that a group of ministers should gather informally in Geneva at the end of June to finalize the decisions on modalities in agriculture and NAMA.
Then we really have only one more month to put together a package based on the modalities in those two areas and the progress in all of the other areas—services rules, trade facilitation, and the interests of developing countries under special and differential treatment—and have that package on the table by the end of July. If we can't do that, it would be impossible to meet the Hong Kong timeline to conclude the negotiations by the end of 2006.
There's a tremendous amount of technical work that will have to be done in the fall by every member of the 149 members of the organization to schedule all of their commitments in all of those negotiations, and then for all of the members to verify one anothers' commitments. One of the lessons we learned from the results of the Uruguay Round was that by not having sufficient time to verify the commitments made to live up to the obligations of the negotiation, a lot of questions were left unanswered or a lot of issues arose, which then had to be resolved, either through dispute settlement or further negotiation. We would want to avoid that again.
So we're really up against tight deadlines.