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Delhi Meeting ‘Breaks Impasse’ in Doha Talks
A meeting of trade ministers from more than 30 countries held in New Delhi, India 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 of the G20 summit 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 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.
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, that objective seemed to have been achieved.
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.
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.
Russia, with US Backing, Hopes to Enter WTO Next Year
Russia hopes to finalise its membership in the WTO before the end of 2010, and the US will support Moscow’s bid, senior officials from the two countries said after a meeting in Washington.
Igor Shugalov, Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister, discussed Moscow’s bid with US Trade Representative Ron Kirk on 21 September. Both men said the meeting went well.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, caused a minor skirmish among trade observers when he announced in June that the country would abandon its unilateral bid to join the WTO and instead pursue membership as a customs union, jointly with former Soviet states Belarus and Kazakhstan. Such an approach is unheard of in the Organization’s nearly 15-year history.
Russia seems to be sticking by its customs-union approach, although Shugalov conceded that heads of state can always change their minds.
Russia, by far the largest economy outside the WTO, has been trying to negotiate its entry into the organisation for 16 years. The accession talks proceeded for more than a decade, and stalled in August 2008 when conflict broke out between Russia and Georgia. Angered by what it considered Russian aggression against a smaller neighbour, the US threatened to block Moscow’s bid to join the global trade body. Russia hit back, vowing to drop some of the commitments it had already made in the accession talks.
WTO Hears Out Civil Society at Annual Public Forum
The WTO opened its doors to civil society, welcoming more than a thousand participants to its annual Public Forum, held this year from 28 to 30 September at the organisation’s headquarters.
The high-level plenary debate that kicked off the three-day conference saw a lively discussion among Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa; Gro Harlem Brundtland, UN special envoy on climate change; and Uruguayan Senator Sergio Abreu. WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy also took part in the two-hour discussion, which centred on how governance can be improved at the global level.
Upon leaving the auditorium, participants broke off to attend concurrent sessions that were organised by NGOs, businesses, academic institutions and international organisations. A total of 44 such sessions were offered over the course of the three-day forum.
As in years past, forum participants heard a wide range of views on food security and trade. At one extreme, Swiss farmers defended a world in which countries protect local production for local consumption; at another, trade negotiators from the Cairns Group of agriculture-exporting countries called for faster and deeper farm trade liberalisation. Multinational agribusiness firms argued for stronger intellectual property protection, while Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, critiqued the agricultural trading system from a human rights perspective.
A session on Tuesday morning was devoted to the linkages between climate change and trade, an issue that is getting particular attention in the run-up to a major meeting in Copenhagen later this year, when climate negotiators will try to hammer out a global deal to reduce carbon emissions.
The session, which was co-organised by Friends of the Earth Europe and the Centre for International Environmental Law, focussed on the question of whether WTO law could be considered a barrier to effective responses to climate change. The panellists generally agreed that current world trade law is not blocking the implementation of effective climate-change measures.
The panellists noted that one major area of contention concerns the possible unilateral implementation of Border Carbon Adjustment (BCA) policies, whereby a country that strictly regulates its carbon emissions would impose charges on goods imported from countries whose policies it considered to be less stringent. Experts continue to disagree over whether BCAs might be justified, and how they might impact international trade flows.
Trade finance was the subject of a session that brought together Korean Trade Minster Jong-Hoon Kim; Jean Rozwadowski, the Secretary General of the International Chamber of Commerce; Raoul Ascari, Chief Operating Officer of the South African export agency SACE; and Lamy, among others.
Developing countries rely heavily on trade finance to help fund their participation in the global market. But many banks have been short on cash since the onset of the financial crisis last year, and exporters have struggled to obtain the loans they need to ship their goods overseas.
This information has been summarised from ICTSD’s Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest
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