The Hindu Business Line : Running out of time

It is apparent that the outlook for the Doha Round is bleak, and it remains to be seen whether the fresh agriculture and NAMA drafts will help to alter its fortunes.

The Commerce Minister, Mr Kamal Nath, has done well to draw attention to the need to focus on the content of the Doha Round negotiations rather than on the schedule. Admittedly, there is nothing new in this because this has precisely been New Delhi’s stand over the past couple of years. Even so, the issue has gained in importance now because of the critical shortage of time available to the international community to get a WTO dealdone. This is perhaps why the empha sis has now shifted to the so-called “horizontal” approach in which participants in the negotiations are expected to include officials, envoys and even Ministers.

As the Commerce Minister has put it, the urgency with which the negotiations need to be conducted has to be “calibrated against the backdrop of realism” and, what is even more important, it has to “match the aspirations of the developing world” and conform to the development-oriented spirit of the Doha Round. While the telescoping of the negotiations road-map is understandable given the indispensability of getting a deal signed and delivered by the end of the year, the ground conditions in the different sectors are far from conducive.

Thus, if one takes the farm scenario, the specific issues which have to be settled are not only quite voluminous — the US Trade Representative, Ms Susan Schwab, has said that “a significant number of the 40-odd outstanding issues” in the farm talks need to be settled before Ministers can be asked to join the negotiations — the differences among the various parties involved on a number of intra-sectoral subjects remains as big as ever. Further, while the talks on agriculture — which have not made any substantive progress — have hogged the limelight, the negotiations on market access for non-agricultural products (NAMA), as the Commerce Minister sees it, have been plagued by the fact that the last draft text represented the views of “only one set of advanced countries while almost completely cold-shouldering the views of more than a 100 developing countries”.

In view of all this, it is apparent that the outlook for the Doha Round is bleak, and it remains to be seen whether the fresh agriculture and NAMA drafts, to be presented shortly by the chairmen of the two negotiating groups in Geneva, will help to alter its fortunes. The problem is that even if they manage to do so, there is a host of other areas such as services, rules, trade-related intellectual property rights, etc, which may play spoilsport, not because of an intrinsic inability to resolve the differences but because there is just not enough time to discuss in depth the problem-issues, without which a truly useful Doha Round for the poor world would not be possible.

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