No consensus yet on new WTO round

By C. Rammanohar Reddy

GENEVA, JULY 31. A two-day review meeting of the World Trade Organisation, which concluded this evening, has confirmed the absence of a consensus among its member-countries on the launch of a new round of trade negotiations, though the U.S. and the European Union keep insisting that progress is being made on narrowing the gaps.

As time begins to run out, trade officials will meet again in September in an effort to reach an agreement before the fourth ministerial meeting that will be held in Doha, Qatar, in November.

Mr. Mike Moore, the WTO Director-General, who has lost no opportunity to champion the cause of a new round of negotiations, warned that failure to begin new negotiations would ``condemn the organisation to a long period of irrelevance''. However, in interventions made during the debate, delegates from rich and poor countries were less concerned about such hyperbole and paid more attention to identifying the problem issues.

Intensive discussions over the past 18 months have made only limited progress in forging an agreement on the implementation problems of the developing countries, the agenda for liberalisation of trade in agriculture, fresh rules on environmental issues and on new proposals for global treaties on foreign investment and competition policies.

At the core of the differences at the WTO is the insistence of the EU that the WTO take up a comprehensive and wide-ranging agenda for talks, an enthusiasm that is not shared by too many countries.

The one shift that has been noticed in this week's meetings is that the U.S. has, for the first time at the WTO, spoken about its willingness to consider limited negotiations on foreign investment and competition.

The strongest statements during the ``reality check'' meetings were made by India, Pakistan, Malaysia and some agricultural exporting nations of South America.

India's WTO Ambassador, Mr. S. Narayanan, presented a five-fold assessment of the situation where he said, first, without meaningful results on implementation issues the Doha meet would not succeed. Second, there is a considerable resistance among the WTO members to a comprehensive agenda. Third, an ``all or nothing approach'' (i.e. that espoused by the EU) is risky because it may result in ``nothing'' rather than ``all''. Fourth, it will be ``a high-risk game'' if the agenda for agriculture was left to be settled at the last minute in Doha. And lastly on environment, which is heading towards becoming the most controversial issue, governments should aim for only a focussed statement at Doha on the absence of a contradiction between the open multilateral trading system and the environment.

Ambassador, Mr. Munir Akram of Pakistan, giving his assessment of the discussions in the past two days outside the conference room, said that with such wide and deep differences between so many countries, it was difficult to see a draft ministerial declaration being prepared in September unless the WTO Director- General and the Chairman of the WTO Council came up with something that put ``a gloss'' on the situation.

A senior trade official using WTO language said: ``One can say more countries are in favour of a round than before, more countries than before support a broad agenda but there is no consensus on any issue.'' This is as good a perception of the current impasse as any.

The perceptions of the state of negotiations reflect what countries want from the WTO agenda. Mr. M.P. Carl, Director- General of Trade in the European Commission and Mr. Peter Allgeier, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative, both said today that considerable progress was being made in the negotiations which was quite the opposite of the contents of their presentations. Norway said that there was not enough progress while a senior trade official from a non-E.U country in Europe called the present position ``a catastrophe''. Most developing countries were, of course, unhappy with the present situation. Malaysia, for example, described it as a situation of `four Ds': ``disappointing, demoralising, discouraging, and at times depressing.''

It also said that the ``high-risk game'' that is now going on has the potential of converting the Doha meeting into a failure or ``Seattle-II''. To complicate matters, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and other Latin American countries have said that their endorsement of a new round was linked to a clear commitment before Doha on an enlarged agenda for agriculture trade liberalisation.

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Section  : International
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