Colombia will join Japan in a comprehensive and collective approach to the coming round of global free-trade talks, but Tokyo must make efforts to abolish agricultural subsidies and improve the transparency of its farm trade rules, Colombian Foreign Trade Minister Martha Ramirez said Thursday.
"At the Uruguay Round (of the previous multilateral trade negotiations), we developing countries abolished trade barriers or lowered tariffs on industrial and high-tech products. Unfortunately, developed countries didn't scrap trade barriers and tariffs on our agricultural exports or give up on the agricultural subsidies as we demanded," Ramirez said in an interview with The Japan Times and other media in Tokyo.
"Basically, we support Japan's proposal for a comprehensive approach to the (upcoming) World Trade Organization round at a single undertaking, but want (Japan) to help balance the negotiations by taking more into account the stance of we developing countries," she said.