Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 13 • Number 37 • 28th October 2009

Lamy Calls for Text-Based Talks, Delegates Express Frustration

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Delegates need to move to text-based negotiations if they want to spur progress toward a global trade deal, WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy stressed to a meeting of WTO officials on Friday. The mood among delegates was grim, with many complaining of back-sliding and a lack of transparency in the negotiating process, but Lamy remained optimistic.

“The past week has seen useful engagement in focused and constructive discussions. There has been no backsliding on the level of ambition,” he told the informal meeting of the Trade Negotiations Committee.

Lamy briefed delegates on his consultations in all of the major negotiating areas and offered his take on prospects for a deal. On agriculture - a primary pillar of the round - Lamy said that it was his sense “that there is a collective endeavour to not lowering the current level of ambition.”

“But at the same time,” he continued, “we have not yet seen tangible progress in the negotiations and, overall, I would say that the current speed with which we are advancing is too slow to arrive at modalities … by early next year.” These ‘modalities’ would be the skeleton of a global deal to cut tariffs and subsidies; if they are not agreed in the next few months, WTO officials will almost certainly fail to meet their goal of wrapping up the Doha Round by the end of 2010, Lamy stressed, adding: “This is the reality.”

To move forward, he said, delegates must begin wrestling with the actual draft legal texts that have been put forward by the heads of each of the negotiating committees. The talks that have taken place over the past several weeks have largely avoided such a direct approach, focusing instead on less contentious questions related to process and housekeeping. But a direct engagement with the texts, Lamy said, is the only way that negotiators can overcome the remaining gaps.

Senior capital-based officials will return to Geneva for meetings from 23-27 November, the final week of work before the organisation’s ministerial conference gets going on 30 November. Delegates will need to prepare in the coming weeks, Lamy stressed, so that the senior officials’ week “can register a qualitative change in the negotiating dynamics and progress on substance.”

Despite the barriers that remain, a successful conclusion of the nearly eight-year-old round remains “perfectly doable,” he said in an address at a conference on Monday.

But the relatively optimistic Lamy seemed to have little company among the delegates present at the Friday meeting.

Addressing the TNC, the Brazilian representative complained that progress in the talks is non-existent, that time for the round is running out, and that the package on the table is beginning to unravel. All of Brasilia’s requests have been rejected, the delegate continued, adding that he thought Lamy was wrong in his assessment that there had been no back-sliding in the talks. Such frustrations may compel the country to disengage at some point, the representative added - strong words from one of the nations that stand to benefit most from a new global trade deal.

Argentina echoed Brazil’s complaints, while Tanzania called for an ‘early harvest’ on the issues of most concern to least developed countries. Delegates from China, Switzerland, Turkey and Taiwan also expressed their frustration with the state of the negotiations.

Concerns and complaints over process

The Doha talks have been proceeding on two planes since a meeting of trade ministers in New Delhi jumpstarted the negotiations at the beginning of September (see Bridges Weekly, 9 September 2009, http://ictsd.net/i/news/bridgesweekly/54723/). At one level, WTO delegates have been engaging in negotiations in Geneva, following the schedule that was agreed by members and presented by Lamy last month (see Bridges Weekly, 23 September 2009, http://ictsd.net/i/news/bridgesweekly/55785/). Those meetings - as frequent as they have been - have not, on the whole, produced much in the way of forward movement, delegates say.

Meanwhile, high-level officials from a handful of key countries have been holding their own closed-door meetings in an attempt to overcome some of the most pernicious stalemates in the talks. The US has reportedly held bilateral consultations with Brazil and India to address differences over contentious issues. The European Union has also been holding its own bilateral consultations. And last week, the EU convened a meeting of the so-called G14 group of countries, which represent the major players as well as the coordinators of the primary developing country negotiating blocs, in an attempt to give the round a ‘confidence boost’, a European delegate said.

But such meetings also have produced little new movement in the talks, trade officials complain. If nothing else, they have certainly raised the hackles of many of the WTO members who have not been invited to the sessions. Several delegates spoke up in Friday’s meeting to complain about a lack of transparency in the process.

More information

The full text of Lamy’s speech to the TNC is available at http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news09_e/tnc_dg_stat_23oct09_e.htm.

ICTSD reporting.