World Trade Organisation: 10 years of unfruitful Doha talks, time for a relook?

Some of the biggest economies feel the talks will never be fruitful.

GENEVA:

Ten years ago, member states of the World Trade Organization launched the Doha Round of negotiations for a global trade liberalisation pact with great fanfare.

But a decade later, discussions have faltered, with the world’s biggest economies acknowledging that negotiations will never come to a fruitful end if talks continue in the same vein.

World leaders said during the G20 summit at the beginning of this month that they “stand by the Doha Development Agenda mandate.”

“However, it is clear that we will not complete the DDA if we continue to conduct negotiations as we have in the past,” they added.

The declaration marked a drastic change of tone from previous summits, when leaders typically pledged to “promptly” bring the negotiations to a close. This year, there was no such mention.

Officials speaking on condition of anonymity said ahead of the G20 summit that it was now difficult to make yet another call for a rapid conclusion of the round, given the repeated failures.

The Doha Round of trade negotiations were launched on November 14, 2001 in the Qatari capital with the aim of helping developing countries grow through improved trade access. However, industrialised and developing nations have time and again failed to agree on the level of cuts on industrial good-tariffs and agriculture subsidies.

In January, some political leaders made call for the conclusion of the round in 2011, with British Prime Minister David Cameron warning that “we cannot go on after a decade with another year” of negotiations. “If we come back and we’re still talking about it, then I think that would be hopeless,” Cameron had said.

Barely three months later, WTO chief Pascal Lamy admitted that the trade talks were on the brink of failure. Member states then began looking at whether it was possible to get a mini-deal of items that are particularly important to the world’s poorest states. However, they soon admitted that they were unable to seal even a downsized accord.

Chinese commerce minister Chen Deming pointed out that given the current morose global economic outlook as well as the fact that several advanced economies would be holding elections shortly, “it will be very difficult to complete Doha talks this year.” “Maybe we will have to go into a sort of hibernation period,” he told a small group of journalists.

“At the moment, unemployment is high in most developed countries and several are heading for elections. So I feel we have to be realistic,” he said. “After this gloomy period, and political calendar, maybe spring will come for the Doha Round,” added Chen. Asked when this spring may be, the minister said “hopefully by end 2012 or early 2013.”

Observers pointed out the current impasse might well be a good moment for WTO member states to reconsider the relevance of the Doha Round. “It’s pretty clear that negotiations are not going anywhere and they are not going anywhere because conditions have changed so much,” noted Karen Hansen-Kuhn, an analyst at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

“We’ve now got issues of food price volatility, financial speculation that should be addressed in these international negotiations, but either don’t fit in the current framework or are there in ways that just don’t really help,” she said.

In fact, calling for further market opening was hard to defend given examples of situations in which trade liberalisation has weakened, rather than strengthened food security because of dumping, she pointed out. “The question is not should we fit new solutions into old boxes, but what are the goals. If the goals are jobs and food security and greater stability, then you need to start from there and figure out the trade rules that make sense,” she said.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 14^th,  2011.