The Doha Round goes for a six

New Delhi has done well to back the “early harvest” package approach to getting the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations off the ground. But, in the same breath, it must be acknowledged, , that the Doha Round will not produce a body of accords which will regulate international trade, for the next 10 years or so.

The Round willbe a truncated one, possibly focussing on the requirements of the least-developed countries which will enable them to catch up a bit faster than would have been the case otherwise with the other economies of the world.

There is, of course, no doubt at all that this would be a big step forward for a very large number of people excluded from the ambit of even basic economic development for centuries.

Dismembered

But the fact remains that the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), enunciated way back in 2001, will now be dismembered beyond recognition, so much so that a couple of years from now – after the “early harvest” approach has been implemented – it will be just one of those noble projects which failed to get off the ground because the economically privileged inhabitants of the planet insisted on refusing to see beyond their nose when it came to negotiating with the poor to raise the living standards of the human race as a whole.

Lamy's admission

In fact, Mr Pascal Lamy, the WTO chief, has, unknowingly, hinted at this chronic inability on the part of a section of negotiators to make sacrifices for the greater good of mankind when he told the WTO Trade Negotiations Committee in Geneva on May 31: “I believe we have to approach this process (of disaggregation) in a co-operative and constructive spirit. Presenting lengthy lists of demands and insisting on all of them will not help us to move forward. Even though the (Geneva) Ministerial is in December, we cannot afford a Christmas tree. We have to build ‘up' rather than ‘down'.

He added “There is precious little time if we are to deliver by the WTO Ministerial Conference. It is time we roll up our sleeves and restart working – that is, negotiating. And as we do so, we must re-create the spirit of co-operation that was present when we launched the Doha Round”.

In this one passage, Mr Lamy has exposed what is grievously wrong with the Doha Round of negotiations ever since it began . Everyone has laid stress on the indispensability of an accord , but very few national negotiating teams have been unwilling to give up an inch so that the Round can cover an extra mile. There is no point in putting the blame on any section of the negotiators because, at the end of it all, every single member of the WTO has suffered.

It is almost certain that an agreement on LDC issues will be notched up by December, although cotton could pose a stiff hurdle in wrapping up the project because of strong lobbies operating in the US. The suspicion is that all the stops will be pulled out to get through this exercise.

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