Convened the first meeting of the Consultative Board of Latvia's membership to the WTO [01.04.1999]

Today, April 1, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the first meeting of the Consultative Board of Latvia's membership to the WTO was held.

On its first agenda were the issues with respect to Latvia's participation in the new or the Millennium round of multilateral negotiations. As reported earlier, in 2000 it is planned to launch a new round of negotiations and it is likely to include negotiating items of particular interest to Latvia – liberalization of trade in agricultural goods, services, as well as the issues of trade and environment, investment and competition policies, etc. The task of the Consultative Board is, after consulting the entrepreneurship and other stakeholders, to prepare a draft national position in advance to the WTO Ministerial conference, to be held in Seattle this autumn. Similarly, it was decided to prepare Latvia's position for the bilateral market access negotiations with the WTO acceding countries (in total 39).

On a separate issue were discussed questions concerning the implementation of Latvia's commitments to the WTO in the areas of intellectual property protection and government procurement.

Members of the Consultative Board also discussed the future organization of Board meetings, coordination of cooperation with the entrepreneurship and public information activities with regard to the current events in the WTO and Latvia's participation in the organization.

Consultative Board was established according to the regulation No 45 of the Cabinet of Ministers "On Procedure of the Implementation of the Membership of Latvia to the World Trade Organization. The chairman of the Consultative Board is Māris Riekstiņš, State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the co-chair is Ilga Preimāte, State Secretary of the Ministry of Economy and as the members of the Board represented are the following ministries and state institutions – Foreign Affairs, Economy, Agriculture, Finance, Justice, Welfare, Environment and Regional development, Transport and Communications, as well as Central Bank of Latvia, Securities Commission, Economic police.

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