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Organisation and Progress of Work
4.
The meeting started with statements by all the OECD donor countries on their revised offers, starting with a joint statement by Reed (Norway) on behalf of Group B donor countries as a whole. These statements are all summarised in Chapter IA(i) of the Report. They are also included in the Summary Records and you will have received copies of the full texts of some of the statements.
5. Preliminary reactions to these statements were then given by developing countries prior to the suspension of the Plenary's work on 24 September. These are recorded in Chapter IA (iii) of the Report.
6. At that stage the Committee went into recess until
1 October to enable consultations to be held on the various schemes on a bilateral and group basis. Most of these consul- tations were aimed at assessing product coverage and in elucidating certain details related to the more complicated schemes, mainly those employing ceilings. There were also a considerable range of consultations with the United States on their requirements for existing and reverse preferences; and the U.K. was consulted by a number of Commonwealth countries on "compensation" for sharing their existing Commonwealth preferences and on reverse preferences. As explained above, the Chairman's contact group also started work on 28 September to consider a list of general topics in relation to the individual schemes. These covered
7.
(1) Legal status
(2) Institutional arr angements
(3) Duration
(4) Safeguards
(5) Least Developed Countries
6) Rules of Origin
7) Existing Preferences
8 Reverse Preferences
(9) Beneficiaries
(10) Contribution of Socialist Countries of
(11
Eastern Europe
Parallel action by LDCs
12 Text of contribution on Preferences to the document
on the U.N. Second Development Decade.
In the event, the extent to which these subjects were covered in the contact group (which as explained above met on and off for most of the rest of Session) varied considerably from one to another. There were long debates on (1) · (6) and to a lesser extent on (10). But the very delicate subjects of existing and reverse preferences and beneficiaries, i.e. (7) (9), were skilfully withheld by the Chairman from open debate, even in the contact group, and were instead syphoned off to small drafting parties of the leaders of the Groups and a few other interested delegations. This served to avoid the sort of discussion that could have raised the temperature or soured the atmosphere. In addition, there was continuous contact in the corridors between the Groups and on a bilateral basis (e.g. between various developing countries and the U.S. over reverse preferences). It is interesting to note that, as far as I know, item (11) designed to cover the exchange of preferences between developing countries was never discussed at all.
8.
When the Plenary resumed on 1 October it spent several meetings going through all the individual submissions to enable
/the developing
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