Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 13 • Number 31 • 16th September 2009

Senior Officials Discuss Doha ‘Road-Map’

Discuss this articleShare your views with other visitors, and read what they have to say

Senior negotiators from major trading nations met in Geneva this week to try to agree on next steps for the troubled Doha Round of trade talks, following a ministerial meeting in Delhi where governments agreed to re-energise negotiations with the aim of concluding the round in 2010 (see Bridges Weekly, 9 September 2009, http://ictsd.net/i/news/bridgesweekly/54723/). However, several delegates expressed scepticism about the prospects for progress in the absence of any movement in countries’ actual negotiating positions.

At the Delhi meeting, over 30 governments agreed to instruct their senior officials to meet in Geneva in the week of 14 September, to draw up ‘a process of engagement’ for the next two to three months. Ministers also asked the officials to work with the chairs of the various Doha negotiating groups to prepare an ‘agenda of action’ for the talks - dubbed a ‘road-map’ by WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, trade sources said.

Negotiators were under pressure to come up with a tangible plan for the round ahead of a meeting of around 20 heads of government in the US industrial city of Pittsburgh next week. The G20 summit declaration, which is expected primarily to address the broader economic crisis, is also due to include some mention of trade - although jaded officials warned that yet more earnest exhortations to reach a deal could do the talks more harm than good if they were not also accompanied by actual progress in the negotiations.

Lamy was said to have asked senior officials from a handful of major countries, along with the chairs of negotiating groups, to attend a Tuesday afternoon invitation-only ‘green room’ meeting aimed at reaching agreement on the ‘road-map’. He was also due to reconvene the group on Friday evening, following parallel discussions convened on Wednesday by the chairs of the negotiating groups on agriculture and industrial goods.

While the Wednesday meetings were open to all members, a follow-up agriculture meeting on Thursday was to be in ‘room E’ format - amongst some three dozen countries representing a cross-section of negotiating groups and interests. Another senior level meeting on trade facilitation was planned for Friday.

Developing countries have continually insisted on the need for the Doha talks to be a ‘bottom up’ process, where bilateral and plurilateral talks complement rather than dictate progress in more inclusive negotiations open to all members - a view reiterated in Delhi. The meetings convened by Lamy reportedly included Australia, Brazil, China, the EU, India, Japan and the US, as well as countries such as Canada, Indonesia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Mexico and South Africa and the chairs of the various negotiating groups.

Road-map fatigue?

Geneva-based negotiators reported that a number of controversial issues require urgent attention before talks can move forward. In agriculture, these include the special safeguard mechanism (SSM), a measure that would allow developing countries to levy additional duties in the event of a sudden surge in the volume of imports or a price depression; tariff simplification, intended to streamline particularly complex tariffs for the benefit of exporters; and the related issues of whether countries will be allowed to create new quotas for tariff lines that had previously been protected only by tariffs, and the number and treatment of the ’sensitive products’ that both developed and developing countries will able to shield from the full force of tariff cuts in exchange for expanding quotas on the same products.

Meanwhile, the talks on non-agricultural market access, or NAMA, will need to focus on non-tariff barriers, sector-specific liberalisation initiatives, preference erosion, and a handful of issues specific to South Africa, Argentina and Venezuela, the chair of the group, Ambassador Luzius Wasescha of Switzerland, said on Wednesday.

Weary negotiators noted that these issues were essentially the same as those identified at a General Council meeting at the end of last year - a sign of the near absence of progress since last autumn. “You’re on a treadmill, you keep running and you’re not going anywhere - but you’re spending a lot of energy,” sighed one delegate.

Another delegate said that it felt as though officials were simply “going through the motions” at this week’s meetings. The negotiations lacked the “fervor” and “passion” of the July 2008 mini-ministerial, the official said - “you could see it from the interventions, the body language.”

Recent changes of administration in several countries, combined with a change of chair for the agriculture negotiations, have hindered meaningful progress in the talks so far this year.

Waiting for Washington

Many developing country delegates have pointed to the US as a particular obstacle to the Doha Round negotiations. As the still-new administration of US President Barack Obama has been largely occupied by other pressing priorities for much of the year - notably healthcare reform, the domestic economy, and the environment - the Doha Round has fallen by the wayside.

“The US is not really ready to re-engage because they’re now focused more on the domestic agenda,” one trade envoy told Bridges, and Geneva-based delegates “are still awaiting the US team.” President Obama announced his appointment of Michael Punke as the US’ next WTO Ambassador just in the past ten days (see Bridges Weekly, 9 September 2009, http://ictsd.net/i/news/bridgesweekly/54696/); Punke has yet to be confirmed by the US Senate.

“Trade is not a priority” for Washington, another delegate said bluntly.

Further confounding progress in the talks, the US indicated in this week’s meetings that it may not be willing to accept the draft negotiating texts of December 2008 as the basis for future negotiations. “They claim that the December texts do not meet US political needs,” said one trade envoy, who stressed that this position was “refused by the majority” of Members, who fear losing the progress that had already been made to that point. He described the impasse as “not very promising” for further progress in the talks.

The elephant in the room

Negotiators acknowledged that the WTO’s planned end-November full ministerial conference may be the ‘elephant in the room’ that no one is mentioning, and yet which may be spurring urgent action. The General Council agreed to a low-profile meeting that will address the WTO’s ‘regular’ business and not the Doha talks, but many delegates query how the gathering can avoid addressing the ongoing negotiations. “For the world at large, you can’t have a ministerial without discussing Doha,” one delegate said.

A rule requiring items for the ministerial agenda to be tabled six weeks ahead of the conference would effectively set a mid-October deadline for the talks, trade sources said. Following the Pittsburgh meeting, sustained high-level engagement would be needed for any chance of progress in the talks before that date, said another.

But other delegates downplayed expectations for the late-autumn meeting. “We don’t expect that it’s going to be something very big coming from the [ministerial] meeting,” a trade official said, although he added that the negotiations “can easily be sped up” if and when “key big players” decide to engage.

ICTSD reporting.