The Hindu Business Line : Going Round and Round

With the areas of divergence getting more prominence than those of convergence, there seems to be something fundamentally wrong in the policy perspectives of key players in the Doha Round.

The Doha Round was slated to see the light of day on January 1, 2006. Since then, new deadlines have been fixed on very many occasions — the last one will expire in a few days’ time — and, already, the WTO Director-General, Mr Pascal Lamy, has begun talking of “the end of 2008”. The obvious question is: Are the WTO members serious about concluding the Round? If not, why is the drama in Geneva being enacted at all, conveying the impression that the participants are all geared to hammering out a successful outcome when, in fact, some important members of the WTO may have wholly different ideas?

On the face of it, the stumbling blocks are the agriculture and non-agriculture market access (NAMA) texts that are being drawn up by the chairmen of the two respective negotiating committees. Drafts have been prepared and, predictably enough, have been rejected by member countries. Clearly, the chances of success depend solely on there being a convergence of views by the different groups involved. While this is widely acknowledged as being the ultimate basis for a successful Doha Round, the plain fact is that, as of now, the areas of divergence are getting more prominence than those of convergence. What is of concern is that the current stage in the bargaining has been reached after more than six years of intense negotiations ever since the Round was launched in late 2001, which points to something fundamentally wrong in the policy perspectives of the important players involved. Admittedly, the ongoing wrangle is focussed on technicalities, such as the flexibility in the pace of tariff reduction on different categories of industrial and farm products for the developing and developed economies. If no meeting ground has been arrived as yet — the latest irritant in the talks in the shape of an informal US-EU proposal to restrict the choice given to developing countries to choose which industrial products to shield from the proposed tariff cuts was uncovered as recently as on December 5 — it is safe to assume that none will be forthcoming in the near future, with grave implications for the fate of the Doha Round.

Since next year is election year in the US, in the normal course, the Congress will not be spending much time on WTO-related issues, which reduces even further the chances of a WTO-specific “fast-track-authority” being given to the Administration (the general FTA given by Congress having expired earlier this year), which is considered indispensable for a successful culmination of the ongoing Doha Round in Geneva. Should the Round be pushed into 2009, its final cold-storaging cannot be ruled out which, as Mr Lamy once said, would result in only one loser — the entire global trading community.

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No deal