TRADE: Doha Round Lurches Forward in More Fits Than Starts

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Apr 21 2006 (IPS) - Although the Doha Round of trade talks continues to stumble, the delegates of the 149 World Trade Organisation (WTO) member countries have not thrown in the towel and are determined to meet the year-end deadline for an agreement.

Sources close to the WTO said the multilateral trade negotiations are not blocked, but merely delayed, although they agreed that too many delays can lead to failure.

“Without a doubt, we are running out of time,” Argentina’s chief negotiator Alberto Dumont told IPS. The deadlines are looming and “unless we make major strides, we are unlikely to meet them.”

A small informal meeting of chief negotiators called by WTO Director General Pascal Lamy admitted Friday that the Doha Round of talks, launched in November 2001 in the capital of Qatar, would likely miss another deadline next week.

During the sixth WTO ministerial conference, held in Hong Kong in December, the delegates agreed that an outline for an agreement on the touchiest areas of the talks – agriculture and tariffs on industrial goods – was to be reached by Apr. 30.

The timeframe outlined by the ministers also set a late July target for a deal on services, and a Dec. 31, 2006 deadline for a final overall agreement.

But with just over a week to go to the April time limit, the negotiators on agriculture and industrial goods have acknowledged failure in their efforts to reach an agreement on formulas and guidelines – known as “modalities” – for phasing out tariffs and removing other trade barriers.

The chair of the negotiating group on industrial tariffs, Canadian ambassador Don Stephenson, admitted that “We did not have a good week.”

“The group could not even start a discussion on the most difficult issues such as core modalities for the formula, implying the tariff reduction formula and coefficients that determine the rates of reduction,” he lamented.

Crawford Falconer of New Zealand, chair of the agriculture negotiations, struck a similar tone, saying the end-of-April deadline “will now clearly be missed.”

Brazilian negotiator Clodoaldo Hugueney said “We feel it is the first Hong Kong deadline that’s not met. So it is a serious situation.”

The slow pace of talks in Geneva has been compounded by recent developments that throw a shadow over the future of the Doha Round. One incident was the unexpected removal of Rob Portman from the post of U.S. trade representative on Tuesday.

While Portman went on to carry out more important functions in the George W. Bush administration, some specialists viewed this move as a sign of a certain lack of interest in the progress of multilateral trade negotiations on the part of the U.S. government.

A month earlier, Portman had warned U.S. agribusiness representatives of the difficulties that could emerge in the Doha Round if the negotiations failed to establish the modalities for agriculture and industrial goods by the end of April.

He stressed that the “fast track” authority granted by the U.S. Congress to the executive branch to reach international trade agreements without the need for specific congressional authorisation in each individual case will expire in July 2007.

Moreover, the renewal of this authority would take years of work and congressional lobbying, Portman added.

In the event that a consensus is reached on a Doha round agreement by late December, the U.S. authorities would still need at least three months to prepare the documentation to accompany the submission of the treaty to Congress, he underlined.

For his part, Dumont emphasised that the work to be undertaken in Geneva will be extraordinarily complex and require long periods of time to hammer out the definitive texts. If a preliminary agreement is reached, these points will be transferred to lists of commitments for each good or service, he explained.

In the case of major trade powers like the United States or the European Union, the lists will involve thousands of tariff lines, and therefore require months of work, the Argentine negotiator said.

Faced with this challenge, the informal meeting of WTO member country delegates concurred Friday on the need for an intensive negotiating process, which will be fully based in Geneva, where the organisation has its headquarters.

These negotiations would hopefully culminate in a definitive text, which would imply merging the two stages of establishing both modalities and figures that reflect the concessions that the various parties are willing to make.

There is a clear will to speed up the work, especially in the areas of agriculture and industrial tariffs, in order to start hammering out the texts, and this in itself is progress, commented Dumont.

“Now we will see if these agreements take the shape of texts with a minimum of square brackets (used in draft versions of international documents to indicate lack of agreement),” he remarked.

The bulk of the WTO member country delegations will meet on Monday to study the decisions reached Friday by the reduced group of delegates.

One proposal that failed to earn a consensus was the idea put forward by a small number of negotiators to call a WTO ministerial meeting in Geneva. “The membership is not ready at the moment for a ministerial meeting at the end of this month,” reported Kenyan negotiator Amina Mohamed.

Nevertheless, convening a meeting of ministers at a later date has not been completely ruled out. “We think that some ministerial engagement could be helpful in trying to put some political input into the negotiations,” noted Huegeney.