Home > Doha Round Enters Stage of Convalescence
by Gustavo Capdevila
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreed on a series of guidelines to breathe new life into the Doha Round of multilateral trade talks that could put an end to agricultural export subsidies, a form of trade protectionism that mainly hurts the developing world.
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreed on a series of guidelines to breathe new life into the Doha Round of multilateral trade talks that could put an end to agricultural export subsidies, a form of trade protectionism that mainly hurts the developing world.
The framework for the talks adopted Sunday by the WTO General Council establishes the key issues that the negotiators will not be able to sidestep when they enter the second stage of negotiations.
WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi said the 147 member states ’’have agreed to substantial reductions in trade-distorting domestic support in agriculture.’’
The Doha Round goes beyond agriculture to encompass tariffs on industrial goods, services, intellectual property, the simplification of customs procedures known as trade facilitation, and other questions.
But the debate on the new framework for the talks was polarised over the issue of agriculture, between developing countries on the one hand and a great majority of the industrialised nations on the other.
These differences were one of the reasons for the failure of the fifth WTO ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico in September 2003, and remained a hurdle in the past few weeks of negotiations that concluded Sunday after a marathon late-night session in Geneva.
The mechanism reached to overcome the deadlock was created by a group known as the Five Interested Parties (FIPs), made up of key political and economic players in the world of trade: the United States, European Union, Australia, Brazil and India.
Australia took part as the coordinator of the Cairns Group, which links efficient agricultural exporting nations, while Brazil and India represented the developing countries in the Group of 20 (G20) alliance that emerged shortly before Cancun.
The FIPs finally reached an agreement Friday on a draft document to put the talks back on track, which they handed over to Supachai and the chair of the General Council Shotaro Oshima. It was used to draft the final version approved Sunday.
The adoption of the new accord prolongs the life of the Doha Round launched in November 2001 in the capital of Qatar. After Cancun, the fate of the talks was on rocky ground, and this weekend’s sessions in the WTO were a trial by fire for the entire process.
The leading trading powers expressed satisfaction with the success of the talks. ’’The Doha Round is back on track,’’ said EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy.
EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler said the accord would ’’push the world economy to create growth and more agricultural trade.’’
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said ’’We have laid out a map for the road ahead.’’ Later we will negotiate ’’the speed limits for how far and how fast we will lower trade barriers.’’
Although the frameworks are not final agreements, they include significant commitments, and Supachai described the accord as a ’’truly historic’’ achievement.
The ’’results are good. Good for the European Union, good for developing countries, good for others,’’ said Lamy.
Argentina’s secretary of Trade, Martín Redrado, used a football metaphor to underline the significance of the accord: ’’The playing field has been marked out, and now we have to play the game, but the field is marked in favour of developing countries.’’
That is true for the first time in 50 years, he said, referring to the 1948 birth of the WTO’s predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
Redrado said that in an initial reading of the document, he saw no clause that hurt developing countries.
However, the international development organisation Oxfam said that in the accord, ’’there is little....to guarantee reforms that would help the poorest countries.’’
Céline Charveriat, the head of Oxfam International’s Geneva office, noted that ’’there are no cast-iron commitments here and no clear timeline for reform.’’
’’We need a more ambitious and radical approach,’’ she said. ’’If rich countries do not immediately put their promises into action, this declaration will become just one more stage in a long journey of disappointment and deception.’’
The head of Uruguay’s negotiators, Guillermo Vallés, said the agreement left all of the countries in a more balanced bargaining position for September, when the Doha Round is to resume, after summer vacation in the WTO. GENEVA, (IPS)