Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 11 • Number 4 • 7th February 2007
Doha Round Negotiations ‘Fully’ Resume; Lamy Sees Favourable Conditions For Deal
Six months after the Doha Round talks broke down in acrimony, trade diplomats have restarted negotiations in another push for a deal. "I am pleased to be able to report some positive news," WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy told Member delegations on 7 February. "We have resumed our negotiations fully across the board."
"Political conditions are now more favourable for the conclusion of the Round than they have been for a long time," Lamy told a session of the General Council, the WTO’s highest permanent decision-making body. "Political leaders around the world clearly want us to get fully back to business," he added, referring to his recent discussions with top government officials, most notably in Davos in late January (see BRIDGES Weekly, 31 January 2007).
The multilateral trade talks have been suspended since talks between six key Members broke down last July, primarily over deep divisions on farm trade. Officials in Geneva have continued to meet informally since then, particularly after Lamy gave the green light to a ’soft’ relaunch of discussions in November (see BRIDGES Weekly, 22 November 2006). With the full-scale resumption of talks, the negotiating bodies focusing on each of the areas in the Doha Round will once again start to meet regularly, under the leadership of their respective chairs.
The WTO chief drew particular attention to the ‘mini-ministerial’ gathering in Davos, where representatives from close to 30 governments demonstrated "a renewed commitment on all sides to put the Doha Round back on track." In addition to expressing support for resuming negotiations, he said that all of the ministers present "declared that flexibilities were available within their mandates." When the negotiations were frozen last year, Lamy said that they would remain on ice until governments came forward with specific new concessions, especially on agriculture.
Bilateral meetings necessary, but so is transparency
Members have not come forward with new formal offers of deeper tariff or subsidy cuts, hints at flexibility notwithstanding.
Now, instead of focusing on ‘headline’ percentage figures for overall tariff and subsidy cuts, negotiators from several countries have been attempting to flesh out details about the various product-specific exemptions and rules that will determine the potential extent to which market access will grow and subsidy spending be restrained. The resulting knowledge about how their principal concerns stand to be affected would, at least in theory, allow Members to determine tolerable outcomes, and then "reverse engineer" the outlines of an overall accord. However, sources report that broad differences persist even in these talks.
Nevertheless, Lamy acknowledged these quiet bilateral and plurilateral discussions, describing their search for "possible areas of convergence" as a "vital input" at the current stage in the negotiations. He also stressed the need for transparency vis-à-vis other Members, and the centrality of the multilateral process in which all delegations participate.
Exactly a week before, during a speech to an informal heads of delegation gathering in which he first recommended resuming across-the-board negotiations, he stressed that Members needed more clarity were the various bilateral discussions were "going, both in terms of substance and of process, especially timing."
At that meeting, Lamy nodded to the progress that had been made in the informal technical talks, saying that he had "detected the start of a new discussion" on the relationship between the [overall trade-distorting domestic support] number and the product-specific elements." He added that Members were "taking a slightly broader view" of the links between the farm tariff cutting formula and the associated ability to shield some products from reduction. Lamy also emphasised that the services negotiations must "not lag behind agriculture and NAMA [non-agricultural market access]." (see related article, this issue)
No deadlines, but urgency obvious
"In my view we should not attempt to set ourselves any false deadlines," Lamy told the General Council. "We are all very much aware of the urgency of the task ahead, but it is also important to reach a substantive outcome which is acceptable to everyone."
Although Members have missed deadlines more frequently than not since the Doha Round was launched over five years ago, sources report that negotiators are taking the current ‘window of opportunity’ to make progress seriously.
The ‘window’ arises from the end-June expiry of the US presidential administration’s mandate to negotiate trade agreements and submit them to Congress for a yes-or-no-vote without the possibility of amendment. US President George W. Bush indicated last week that he would ask Congress to extend this ‘trade promotion authority.’ It is believed that a breakthrough in the negotiations would help convince Congress to agree, which would in turn greatly simplify the process of finalising any eventual Doha Round deal.
Members broadly welcome resumption
Many delegations intervened to welcome the resumption of talks and stress the need to translate the various statements of political support into concrete progress in the talks.
Barbados sounded a note of caution about the ‘reverse engineering’ process, saying that developing countries had never asked for it. It suggested that the approach risked adding complexities to the negotiations at an inappropriate juncture, and that it might not address development concerns appropriately. The US said that it was aware of need to multilateralise the outcome of bilateral and plurilateral discussions, and stressed that it remained available to meet informally with other delegations.
Some Members commented on the Bush administration’s recently-unveiled proposals for future farm spending. Along with the debate on trade promotion authority, negotiators are closely watching to see how Congress will write the next farm bill. Sources report that Australia said on behalf of the Cairns Group that it would closely examine the Bush administration’s proposals, since the farm exporters’ ultimate objective is to remove all forms of trade-distorting support. The G-20 said that the proposed reforms did not go far enough (see recent story, this issue).
Talks are now getting underway in each of the Doha Round negotiating groups. Agriculture negotiations Chair Ambassador Crawford Falconer (New Zealand) has called an informal meeting of all Member delegations for 9 February. Sources report that the chair of the NAMA talks was planning to convene a gathering of a small group of ambassadors, modelled after Falconer’s ‘fireside chats’, in order to help determine how to proceed. The services chair met with Members last week, and has scheduled a new round of discussions starting from 26 February.
Lamy, for his part, has repeatedly urged Members to address all of the issues on the negotiating table in a constructive manner, "in the full, and shared conviction that this deal is doable."
The head of the WTO also announced that a high level meeting on cotton would be held in Geneva on 15-16 March.
ICTSD reporting.