Ever rudderless WTO

The ninth ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation is scheduled to be held at Bali in December. The drums have started beating again in an attempt to herald the elusive big step forward on the Doha Round.

As the outgoing Director-General, Pascal Lamy, told the WTO Trade Negotiations Committee meeting in Geneva earlier this week, “We have about 40 working days left before the end of July, which I see as the last petrol station before the Bali highway. We must make substantive advances in this period if we are to have any chance of successfully delivering in Bali and preparing a post Bali roadmap”.

One hopes that Lamy’s ambition will be achieved because if that happens, the only beneficiaries will be the international community itself, specially its weaker members. There is, frankly, no indication that things will be any different this time around. Already, alterations have been made in the structure of the negotiations – such as amendment of the single-undertaking approach – to ease the Doha Round’s passage, but it does not appear that the concession (which was unthinkable at one point of time) will have the intended impact.

SAME BATTLELINES

The principal barrier to the Doha Development Agenda seeing the light of day lies in the political opposition of a number of developed-country members to trade concessions being extended to developing economies. Trade lobbies in the rich countries do not want to encounter even more competition and politicians in these countries do not want to upset them.

Since it would be too brash and crude to openly run down the Doha Development Agenda on these narrow, self-seeking considerations, the opposition has been cloaked in the garb of a challenge to the developing-economy status of WTO members like China and India.

Since this very basic approach to the Doha Agenda has remained unchanged ever since it was drawn up in 2001, there is no reason to suppose that Bali will meet with any more success than the previous ministerial conferences. Non-agricultural market access (NAMA) and agriculture were the two major stumbling blocks in the way of the Doha Round being successfully concluded in previous years. So deep-rooted are the differences with regard to NAMA that the entire subject has been set aside as far as Bali is concerned, the focus being on “less important” areas like trade facilitation. Agriculture has been retained, but from what Lamy has said about its prospects at Bali it appears that not much headway will be made.

LAMY’S OPTIMISM

The WTO Chief said that at a meeting of a group of Trade Ministers held on the sidelines of the recently held annual OECD ministerial conference in Paris, he had asked whether “in particular the so-called ‘majors’ were ready to be more flexible in their positions by moving more to the middle and not simply asking others to move where they were”. He said that from the discussions “it was encouraging to see the realism, focus and determination that Ministers displayed”.

It is, however, more or less certain that the “sense of realism” Lamy detected at Paris will not affect the Bali outcome.

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