28th July 2010

Bridges Weekly | Lamy Reports ‘New Dynamic’ in Doha Talks

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A “new dynamic” has emerged in the Doha Round negotiations, the head of the WTO told trade delegates on Tuesday, delivering a rare piece of good news for the beleaguered nine-year-old talks.

“After some months of impasse in the negotiations, my own sense is that we are beginning to see signs of a new dynamic emerging,” WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy told trade officials at a meeting of the organisation’s Trade Negotiations Committee on Tuesday.

“Clearly, it is too early to say whether this new dynamic is firmly rooted and can expand to all issues under the negotiating agenda which still lag behind in terms of maturity,” he continued. “It is also too early to see how you engage on horizontal trade-offs across different areas.”

The WTO’s Doha Round trade talks, which were launched in 2001 with the aim of helping developing countries build their economies through freer trade, have struggled with a thorny political climate over the past two years. The last high-level push for a breakthrough agreement came in July 2008, when ministers gathered in Geneva for what turned into a nine-day negotiating marathon. That meeting collapsed over a dispute on agriculture trade; the talks have largely languished ever since.

In a promising political turn in September 2009, G20 heads of state called for the Doha Round to be completed by the end of 2010, citing the round’s importance in ensuring a sustainable economic recovery. G20 leaders met again in Toronto in June, and again they called for global trade talks to be brought to a close. This time, however, there was no mention of a deadline.

Despite the political lull on liberalising multilateral trade, Director-General Lamy has persistently proposed new strategies to drive the talks forward. Earlier this year, he urged WTO officials to adopt a “cocktail approach” to the negotiations - mixing bilateral meetings, small group consultations with Lamy, and multilateral processes in an effort to find some new space in the talks.

This approach seems to have produced at least a few positive results, a number of WTO ambassadors said at Tuesday’s meeting. US Ambassador to the WTO Michael Punke noted that the cocktail approach has produced “some initial, hopeful signs.” Chinese Ambassador Sun Zhenyu described the new strategy as “positive and helpful.”

But, of course, many divisions in the talks remain.

The United States’ position has been the focal point of much of the recent controversy. Washington has for several months been demanding deeper concessions from large developing countries like Brazil, India and China. The US ambassador repeated that theme on Tuesday, reminding those assembled that, at the Toronto G20 summit, US President Barack Obama had “called attention to the particular responsibilities of the emerging powers of our 21st century economy.”

But the emerging economies insist that they have already bled enough in the talks. They accuse the US of trying to roll back the hard-fought progress that has come over the course of nearly nine years of Doha Round negotiations.

“To complete the round, we need to stick to the mandate of development and capture what is already on the table and not to re-do the whole thing,” Chinese Ambassador Sun told the meeting.

Brazilian Ambassador Roberto Azevedo echoed that sentiment. “In our view, we must find solutions within the realm of what is on the table,” he said. “Any attempt to get more in a selective and non-reciprocal fashion will not help the process and could only lead to a quick unravelling of the negotiations with serious and long-lasting consequences.”

Such debates will be put on hold over the next four weeks, as delegates clear out of Geneva for their annual summer holidays. As usual, the organisation will resume its work in early September.

Lamy, ever a lover of metaphors, left delegates with an image: “As I said earlier, we have all the ingredients of our cocktail. The mood music is more upbeat. Now we need to move from stirring the cocktail to shaking it vigorously, vertically and horizontally,” he said.

“When we come back refreshed in September we will need to start turning these plans into real progress by intensifying engagement,” he added.

ICTSD reporting.

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