#Brexit advances at #WTO as Britain sets out new services terms - diplomats

Britain has sent World Trade Organization members a draft of the terms for its trade in services with other countries after Brexit, an important part of its divorce from the European Union, trade diplomats said last week, writes Tom Miles.

Britain needs to disentangle its WTO membership agreement from the European Union‘s, and has yet to draft a similar text for trade in goods, expected to be much more complicated because of the need to share out agricultural import quotas.

Every member of the WTO has its own pair of schedules - one document covering services trade and one covering merchandise trade - which are essentially its membership agreements setting out what it agreed to when it joined the Geneva-based body.

Any of the other 163 WTO members could object to Britain’s services schedule if they felt it infringed their rights, but documentation in that area is seen as relatively straightforward because the 23-year-old document is not very restrictive.

Trade Minister Liam Fox told Britain’s parliament last November that his first priority was to secure Britain’s own WTO schedules, before moving onto EU free trade agreements (FTAs) with other countries, and then negotiating new FTAs.

But the negotiations over the schedules covering trade in goods got bogged down as soon as Britain announced how it wanted to approach the problem last October, because big agricultural exporters said they would lose out.

Last week Fox was in Geneva holding talks with all interested parties, but did not resolve the problem, trade diplomats said.

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