Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 13 • Number 30 • 9th September 2009
Delhi Meeting ‘Breaks Impasse’ in Doha Talks
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First politics, then substance, seems to be the order of the day for the WTO’s Doha Round of global trade talks. A meeting of trade ministers from more than 30 countries held in New Delhi, India last week produced a ‘unanimous’ resolve to push ahead in the negotiations, but the officials shied away from discussing the technicalities of the talks, where the real work remains to be done.
The meeting, held on 3 and 4 September, was meant to inject momentum into the talks ahead of a G20 heads of state summit to be hosted by the US in Pittsburgh on 24 and 25 September. Trade ministers said the negotiations will have to maintain some of the momentum they picked up at the Delhi meeting if negotiators are to finalise a global trade deal before the end of 2010, the goal set by G8+G5 heads of state at a summit in Italy in July (see Bridges Weekly, 15 July 2009, http://ictsd.net/i/news/bridgesweekly/50639/).
The Delhi meeting marked the most important Doha Round gathering of trade ministers since the collapse of high-level talks at WTO headquarters in Geneva in July 2008. Since then, the Doha Round’s cast of characters has shifted: former trade ministers Peter Mandelson of the EU, Kamal Nath of India and Susan Schwab of the US have moved on and been replaced; now Catherine Ashton, Anand Sharma, and Ron Kirk occupy their spots respectively. The new personalities appear to have breathed some fresh air into the negotiations, which have stumbled many times since their launch in 2001.
The technicalities of the talks were officially off the agenda at the Delhi meeting; the ministers instead focused on overcoming political hurdles to progress toward a deal. Judging from the officials’ public pronouncements, at least, that objective seems to have been achieved.
“The impasse has been broken and it has been agreed by all, and backed by strong consensus, to work toward the successful completion of the Doha round,” Anand Sharma, India’s minister for commerce and industry, told reporters after the meeting. “The chief negotiators will meet in Geneva in the week beginning September 14 to restart and re-engage the Doha round of talks,” Sharma added.
Other ministers were equally optimistic. EU Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton called the 2010 deadline “absolutely achievable.”
“There is still real strong political will to finish, and we have to keep going with this initiative and move to try to resolve it,” she said.
And WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, who attended the Delhi gathering, said that he hoped the meeting could be “the beginning of the endgame of the Doha Round.”
The talks that kick off in Geneva next week will be based on the draft texts on trade in agriculture and industrial goods that were released in December. US Trade Representative Ron Kirk - who has said that Washington will need greater clarity on market access outcomes if a deal is to win favour in the United States - stressed in a news conference that, while past work should not be lost, the existing draft texts were not perfect.
“There are some countries that believe that the 2008 text are inviolate, but the reality is they’re called drafts for a reason,” Kirk said.
But whether any progress will be made in the talks depends on whether political support for a deal can be sustained, and how easily trade ministers can sell a potential agreement back home.
“At this point of the game, we all have empty pockets, notably after the outset of the world economic crisis,” said Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Amorim, as reported in The New York Times. “Many of us - and frankly I see no exception - have difficulties to live up to the efforts and reforms that the new commitments will require.”
Kirk was similarly frank about the political hurdles a deal faces in the United States, noting that Americans want to see a deal that creates jobs and expands access to foreign markets, while ensuring the protection of the environment and workers’ rights. “There are very few people in America, either in Congress or the traditional constituencies, that support free trade agreements, that believe that Doha currently meets those objectives,” Kirk told a press conference after the meeting. “But we think it can be constructed so that it would.”
While the downturn in the global economy could make it more difficult for ministers to sell an agreement at home, some observers argue that it also makes a deal that much more imperative.
A recent study from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think-tank, found that a global trade agreement could boost world exports by between US$180 billion and US$520 billion annually, depending on the deal’s level of ambition, and inject between US$300 billion and US$500 billion into the global economy. The authors conclude that the gains from a Doha deal would not require any increase in taxes or government debt and would be “well balanced between developed and developing countries.”
ICTSD reporting; “Trade talks resume, but divides remain,” THE NEW YORK TIMES, 4 September 2009; “Trade chiefs agree to resume talks, breaking 14-month impasse,” BLOOMBERG, 4 September 2009.
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