Are we ready?

After a seven-month suspension, the World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations in agriculture have finally resumed.

But is this a cause for us to celebrate?

Last September, the WTO negotiations called the Doha development agenda collapsed at the ministers’ meeting in Cancun, Mexico with developed and developing countries in wide disagreement. Credit should be given to the developing nations, including the Philippines, who stood their ground and who refused to give in to the demands of the developed world for a more open market.

It seems now that some major WTO players are in a hurry to get things down between now and August 2004 before changes in European Union representation and the most intense stage of US elections take place.

The US, which needs much wider access to foreign agricultural markets in both developed and developing countries, is proposing that tariffs be reduced by what is called a Swiss formula, where the highest tariffs are reduced the most and no tariffs exceed 25 percent. This would depart fundamentally from the less ambitious approach taken in the Uruguay Round negotiations, which required only a mix of minimum and average cuts. Exception might be given though to two to three percent of agricultural items particularly the most politically sensitive ones.

The US is also willing to consider special and differential treatment case by case for developing countries‚ tariffs to avoid hardship for subsistence farmers, chief US agricultural trade negotiator Allen Johnson also said.

But is there adequate protection for us?

The developing nations have succeeded in getting the big players to listen when they abandoned the Doha talks. Let us not be sweet talked into agreeing this time.

America On VoIP

Here is a piece from Washington Post (sent by one of our readers) which I am reprinting to guide our own National Telecommunications Commission as it prepares a voice-over-the-Internet (VOIP) policy:

"As if the telephone companies didn’t have enough problems, the cable companies are coming after them with Internet phones. The phones look and behave like regular phones, but the service generally costs less. The main difference is that voices get chopped into digital packets, which travel over the Internet and are reassembled at the other end. So, is an Internet phone the same as a phone? That’s what regulators across the country are bickering over as they struggle to figure out what the emerging technology known as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) might mean for consumers and the heavily regulated phone industry. Though Internet and traditional phones serve similar purposes, current regulations treat them differently. A federal judge in Minnesota ruled this month that the state’s Public Utilities Commission could not regulate Internet phone companies.

According to the judge, Congress has expressed a clear intent to leave the Internet free from undue regulation so that [its] growth and exploration may continue. State regulation would effectively decimate Congress’s mandate that the Internet remain unfettered by regulation.

The issue is now front and center – after a decade of fits and starts – because Internet telephony finally appears ready to go mainstream, with improvements in the technology and a recent push from start-ups and cable operators. The upshot, according to analysts, may be lower costs for consumers and brutal price competition for phone companies.

Businesses are embracing the technology the fastest. Nearly 10 percent of businesses have replaced their old systems with some form of VoIP, and that transition is accelerating. Most major cable operators hope to sell Internet phone service to their residential customers, bundled with television programming and Internet access.

Newcomers such as Vonage Holdings Inc., 8x8 Inc. (also known as Packet8), Free World Dialup and Skype also are selling Internet calling plans, at prices ranging from free to about $40 a month. Even traditional phone companies – the ones most threatened by VoIP – are using the Internet to reduce their transmission costs, because it doesn’t require expensive routing equipment. Also, a call takes up more space on a traditional network than it does in its chopped-up format on an Internet network. Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Corp. use a version of the technology to transport calls within their networks. BellSouth Corp. has gone further; it recently started selling Internet phone service to businesses and plans to offer it to residential customers next year.

Phone companies can’t afford to ignore the trend, analysts say, because they’re racing with cable companies to sell bigger bundles of digital services to homes and businesses. If they don’t innovate to match the cable companies, it could leave their main business vulnerable, some say.

But Verizon, the largest phone company, says cable operators face an uphill climb trying to take Internet phones to the masses. Local phone companies are at a disadvantage, some say, because they are required to pay tariffs and provide public services that Internet phone companies have so far avoided. But regulators in about a dozen states are considering imposing some of the same rules on Internet phone services.

The issue appears headed for the Federal Communications Commission which plans to hold a hearing. FCC chairman Michael K. Powell recently said he sees the debate as "a manifestation of a bigger challenge" – deciding which services should be regulated and which should not as Internet services merge with older technologies. "We think pretty quickly there’s no reason why virtually any communication service" won’t be Internet-based, Powell said.

Skeptics say VoIP technology still faces significant hurdles.

Good Internet phone service depends in large part on a speedy connection, which is why businesses are adopting it faster than individuals, most of whom still have slower Internet links at home. Call quality also is affected by traffic congestion, which in turn can depend on whether a call is traveling over the public Internet or through private cable networks.

Also, unlike regular phones, most Internet phones lack their own electrical power sources, so if power goes out, so does the phone. Calls are harder to trace, too, posing problems for emergency workers accustomed to pinpointing the location of calls to 911.

In the long run that could be bad news for Verizon, even though the number of Internet-based callers today is minuscule compared with its traditional customer base. The regional phone giant, however, has a plan to leapfrog the cable companies by replacing copper wires in all the homes and offices it serves with high-capacity fiber-optic cables.

"Is [cable telephony] a huge threat? No. But do I take cable companies seriously? Yes, I do," said Bruce S. Gordon, president of retail markets for Verizon. "Do they have the potential to take market share? Sure."

Gordon said Verizon is testing its own version of VoIP and can match cable firms in both price and service. "We are prepared to compete," he said."

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