Cancun, Mexico – Doug Wiley, senior vice president of government relations at the Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA), today commended Ambassador Robert Zoellick of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) for his remarks Tuesday advocating a sectoral approach to tariff elimination on manufactured goods, as well as a focus on non-tariff trade barriers. These two issues are the pillars of EIA’s position on World Trade Organization (WTO) market access negotiations and are incorporated into the Alliance’s published position paper on the issue.

“What we hope will come out of the framework here is an effective formula to try to cut tariffs as much as we can, with the focus particularly on the higher tariffs, with due attention for developing countries; a sectoral approach, as our predecessors did with the Information Technology Agreement, which can move trade throughout sectors and help global sourcing; and also non-tariff barriers,” Zoellick said at a press conference before the opening today of the WTO’s Cancun Ministerial Conference.

In its position paper and in its meetings with U.S. government officials, EIA has offered compelling arguments on behalf of the high-tech industry, urging a “zero-for-zero” approach to tariff elimination, specifically in the electronics sector. Similar to Ambassador Zoellick’s comments on a sectoral approach, EIA’s paper notes, “Sectoral tariff elimination is a proven approach that has led to breakthroughs in past negotiations when other approaches have met obstacles or faltered. Such an approach was used to reach results in the Uruguay Round ‘zero-for-zero’ initiative and the subsequent Information Technology Agreement.”

EIA’s paper goes on to say, “The two-pronged strategy of addressing and eliminating both tariff and non-tariff barriers will allow for a concerted assault not only on high tariffs, which are a problem in some markets, but also on more subtle barriers, which are problematic elsewhere.” 

Mr. Wiley and Mary Alexander of Panasonic, the chair of the EIA’s International Trade Committee, are representing EIA in Cancun this week. While at the Conference, they will be meeting with other countries’ delegations to advance the position advocated by both the Alliance and USTR. Please click here to read EIA’s position paper.