The Hindu Business Line : New hope for Doha round

The UPA Government should not rush to cobble together an accord on the Doha Round just to accommodate the schedule of the US Presidential elections.

Reports indicating that New Delhi has begun preparing for a WTO ministerial meeting in May have once again raised the hope that there may be soon be a successful resolution of the ongoing Doha Round negotiations. While this is true, a note of caution must be sounded, namely, that the UPA Government should not show undue haste in helping to cobble together an accord just for the sake of accommodating the schedule of the US Presidential elections.

New Delhi is said to have taken seriously the WTO Director-General, Mr Pascal Lamy’s suggestion that since there is no point in continuing with the negotiations as one gets closer to the US poll process, they would have to be suspended around the middle of the year. According to him, a Ministerial meeting held before the suspension would not only imply political acceptance by the WTO member-state of the progress made before the talks are suspended but would also make it difficult for the next US Administration to ignore what has been achieved at the negotiating table. Schematically, this makes good sense, but the more important point is to truly agree on a body of accords that could then be formalised, in a manner of speaking, by the proposed Ministerial. To say the least, the prospect of such an agreement is bleak. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, the Union Commerce Minister, Mr Kamal Nath, made it clear that there were around 150 points of discord in the farm negotiations, which had to be reduced to not more than 50 before a ministerial could be held. The scale of the disagreement, as indicated by the Commerce Minister, is the result of intense bargaining spread over nearly six years, which makes the expectation of two-thirds of the troublesome points being settled in the course of another five or six weeks unrealistic.

This is the danger the Doha Round is facing today, one that could derail the WTO from the good work it is currently doing (mainly in the dispute-settlement sphere) and also ‘defang’ it vis-À-vis future trade liberalisation programmes. The Commerce Minister has time and again emphasised that the content of any agreement is much more important than meeting schedules, a point reiterated by the EU Trade Commissioner as a principle earlier this month when he said vis-À-vis the India-EU trade talks that both New Delhi and Brussels wanted to “deliver what is best for both of us and not the fastest”. Much is being expected of the revised agriculture and non-agriculture market access (NAMA) drafts, which will be released shortly, as also of the services negotiations (of crucial importance to New Delhi), which have finally got under way. The ground realities, however, point to hurdles which will be difficult to cross in so short a time.

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