Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 14 • Number 6 • 17th February 2010

Doha Pessimism Dominates as ‘Stocktaking’ Announcement Nears

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WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy is expected to make a long-anticipated announcement regarding an end-March ‘stocktaking exercise’ on the Doha Round trade talks when he addresses a meeting of the WTO’s General Council on Tuesday. The proposed exercise is meant to assess whether the eight-year-old trade talks can be brought to a conclusion before the end of 2010, an outcome that trade officials say is increasingly unlikely.

“Stocktaking? There’s no stock to take!” one delegate, frustrated with the slow pace of the talks, exclaimed to Bridges. Another official complained that negotiators have just been “going through the motions” over the past few weeks of negotiations, without engaging in any true give-and-take. “It’s not looking good for 2010,” a third official said.

The negotiating committees on the critical areas of industrial goods, services and agriculture have all held meetings since the beginning of February, but to little avail.

The negotiating committee on industrial goods talks, which met during the first week of February, narrowed some gaps in members’ views on non-tariff barriers to trade, but negotiators completely sidestepped the main area of contention in the talks: whether participation in sector-wide tariff-cutting deals should be voluntary or mandatory. Meanwhile, the negotiations on services liberalisation apparently saw “no movement” at all, according to a source close to the talks.

Even the talks on trade facilitation - usually the golden boy of the Doha Round talks - moved at a glacial pace during a first official meeting of 2010. There “was not much advance” during the week of talks that began on 8 February, one source said. Another groaned that there are “still so many brackets,” or areas of divergence, that must be worked through.

Meanwhile, the agriculture talks have also been largely treading water. Delegates have only discussed issues of controversy in informal consultations with the chair of the talks, Ambassador David Walker of New Zealand, at the New Zealand Mission; the touchy subjects have not been broached in any formal meetings. Official talks have largely centred on the technicalities of the Special Safeguard Mechanism, a tool that would allow developing countries to raise tariffs to protect domestic producers from import surges and price depressions. Some delegates have complained that the new demands on the SSM put forward by the G33 developing country group have taken the talks backwards, not forwards.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that there’s not much movement” in the negotiations as a whole, said one informed trade source, who added that “there are no political signals” to indicate that a Doha deal could be wrapped up soon.

Many delegates say that the US, which still lacks an official ambassador to the WTO, is the primary drag on the pace of the negotiations. More than a year after US President Barack Obama took office, several critical trade posts remain unfilled thanks to partisan political point-scoring on Capitol Hill. One source argued, however, that delegates might be putting too much focus on the US stance, pointing out that the EU also lacks ambassadorial representation at the WTO at the moment.

Where to go from here?

DG Lamy is expected to hold a Green Room meeting on 18 February to gauge members’ views on how the end-March stocktaking should proceed. When he announced the possibility of such an exercise late last year, Lamy did not specify whether the gathering would involve trade ministers or lower-level officials.

Lamy is expected to clarify this point at the General Council meeting on Tuesday, but so far the DG has given no clear indication of what he intends to say, sources report. At this point, however, a high-profile meeting of ministers appears to be almost out of the question.

ICTSD reporting.