The Hindu Business Line : All quiet on the Doha front

More than the schedule of negotiations, it is the substantive element that needs to be accorded the pride of place as far as the Doha talks are concerned.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

Barring a miracle — and it will be a miracle if it occurs — there is simply no possibility at this point of time of a breakthrough occurring on the Doha Round of multilateral trade talks. Admittedly, consultations are continuing both at Geneva and at other places to forge a bridge reconciling the differences that have held up progress in negotiations over the past four years. But the prospects for these confabulations point to a future where they will contin ue interminably without any concrete gains being registered at the negotiating table.

In fact, the present is a specially inopportune moment to hope for a successful conclusion to the Doha talks. This is because of the forthcoming seventh Ministerial meeting of the WTO, which is to be held in Geneva at the end of this month. This view will, of course, be challenged straightaway by optimists who, among other things, will quote from official documents to argue that the preparations for the conference — being held after four years instead of the two mandated by the Marrakesh Declaration — will in no way affect the ongoing Round negotiations.

Indeed, one of the “six principles” enunciated by Mr Pascal Lamy, WTO chief, on October 20, 2009, governing the holding of the Geneva Ministerial meeting does state specifically that the preparatory work for the Ministerial “should not divert energy and attention” from the Doha Development Agenda. But this sensible intention will of course be flouted, not because of any innate urge on the part of the participants to deliberately ignore an official stipulation but because the much-flogged Doha negotiations have been stripped of all novelty while the Ministerial looks a far better bet to inject some life into WTO proceedings.

In fact, as late as the end of October, while Mr Lamy (as is his wont) has been cautiously optimistic about the “progress” being made in the negotiations, reports were forthright in depicting a deep sense of frustration among WTO national delegates who have been attending routinely the Doha Round meetings in Geneva. Among other things, the WTO chief has been quoted as telling an informal gathering of the Trade Negotiations Committee that there has been “useful engagement in focused and constructive discussions,” there being “no backsliding on the level of ambition”.

Even so, he was reduced to calling a spade a spade when he said: “we have not yet seen tangible progress in the (agriculture) negotiations and, overall, I would say that the current speed with which we are advancing is too slow to arrive at modalities … by early next year”. He reportedly added that the “modalities” form the skeleton of a global deal to cut tariffs and subsidies, and if they are not agreed to within the next few months, WTO officials would almost certainly fail to meet their goal of wrapping up the Doha Round by the end of 2010. Not that one was waiting for him to say this, but Mr Lamy is reported to have added, glumly: “This is the reality”.

draft legal texts

The WTO chief, who maintains that the Doha Round is “perfectly doable”, has said that the only way the negotiations can meet their 2010 deadline is to start tackling the draft legal texts drawn up by the chairmen of the agriculture and NAMA negotiating committees, the basic assumption here being that the drafts themselves have been broadly agreed to by participants in the negotiating process.

The problem is that this may not be so because, if the drafts were indeed popular and free of controversy, the negotiators would already have taken up the process from there. But this, as everyone knows, has not happened, as is perhaps best indicated by Mr Lamy’s appeal, which underscores the lack of real progress on the Doha front.

This state of affairs is also indicated by the sense of frustration prevailing generally among officials of important WTO member-nations in Geneva. Thus, according to one report, the Brazilian representative is said to have told the Trade Negotiations Committee that progress in the talks was “non-existent, that time for the Round is running out, and that the package on the table is beginning to unravel”. More importantly, he is reported to have charged that the WTO chief was wrong to have suggested that there had been no back-sliding in the talks, and that “such frustrations may compel the country (Brazil) to disengage at some point”. Argentina is said to have backed the Brazilian stand, while countries such as China, Switzerland, Turkey and Taiwan are said to have expressed their dissatisfaction with the state of the negotiations as well.

Substantive element

It has been pointed out frequently that, more than the schedule of the negotiations, it is the substantive element that needs to be accorded the pride of place as far as the Doha negotiations are concerned. Needless to say, this is a sensible view to adopt if the Round is to be really effective in facilitating the healthy growth of international trade based on development considerations.

Similarly, there is another structural nuance that needs to be promoted vigorously if the negotiations are to stand a fair chance of success, namely, the strengthening of the attributes of inclusivity and transparency, which in fact have already been diluted in an effort to engineer agreements among a handful of the national players so as to stick (as yet unsuccessfully) to successive deadlines. In fact, at the Trade Negotiations Committee meeting referred to above, several delegates are said to have expressed dissatisfaction with “a lack of transparency in the process”.

One of the guiding principles for the seventh Ministerial conference, which Mr Lamy laid out as early as May this year at a General Council meeting, was what he described as “FIT”, that is, Full participation, Inclusiveness and Transparency. This, as he saw it, was the main reason why the Ministerial “should be centred around plenary sessions in which all Ministers could participate equally”.

At the meeting, the same point was laboured by a number of countries with differing backgrounds, which clearly suggests that the Doha Round just cannot take the “exclusivity” path to a successful outcome because of the level of distrust that has grown within the international community on the subject of multilateral trade negotiations.

As the Swiss representative put it succinctly at the General Council meeting in May, the “first thing Members needed to move towards was to rise above the level of unilateral consultations and engage in bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral consultations, because one of the goals they had not yet achieved in the negotiations was to create genuine complicity among the participants — a sense of ownership of the negotiating process by all Members”.

The question to ask is: Can such a level of trust be forged now, or is it too late?