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GENEVA — World Trade Organization chief Pascal Lamy is backing a new approach to the stalled Doha round of global trade talks, suggesting that the WTO’s members could agree to bite-size chunks rather than swallowing the indigestible whole in one go.
The Doha round has reached deadlock this year after a decade of talks but trade diplomats, who have woven a massive web of interlinked concessions and promises in the quest for a deal, say nobody will dare to declare the negotiations dead.
However, there has been no agreement so far on how to move forward on the talks, officially called the Doha Development Agenda, which would be the biggest step towards global trade liberalization since the WTO was created 16 years ago.
Pressure is on trade ministers from the WTO’s 153 member countries to come up with an answer when they convene in Geneva in December.
Mr. Lamy invited about 35 ambassadors to the WTO on Tuesday to prepare the ground for the upcoming ministerial conference, one of the participants at the meeting revealed on condition of anonymity.
The Doha talks were at an “impasse” and the current economic crisis was making progress even harder to attain, although nobody was suggesting giving up on the Doha agenda, Mr. Lamy told them, according to the source.
Mr. Lamy advocated trying to reach deals on specific parts of the negotiation that were considered “low hanging fruit,” the least contentious areas that could be agreed quickly on their own. More difficult issues would be tackled more slowly.
“Everyone in the room agreed on this today,” the source said. “Since it’s totally moribund now, it would reactivate and re-energize the negotiating process as it stands, and people could begin to look for agreement going down the line.”
The idea still has to be put to the full membership of the WTO at a committee meeting on Friday, when other countries could raise objections.
Mr. Lamy’s new approach is the latest in a string of ideas to breathe new life into Doha. Earlier this year he proposed that WTO members should lower their sights and try to agree on a smaller package, a so-called early harvest of the fruit of the talks.
But even that failed, raising fears among trade officials and diplomats that the inertia in the negotiation was putting the credibility of the whole global trading system at risk.
If adopted, the new idea would force negotiators to give up hard-won concessions, which often link one area of trade to another completely separate issue, and would effectively unravel 10 years of haggling in the hope of reaching easier piecemeal deals.
The ambassadors did not specify any areas that might be easy to agree separately. They also proposed that the ministers needed to acknowledge there would be no agreement on the full Doha package in the short term.
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Source: Business World, October 20, 2011
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