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Liberalisation in world trade over
recent decades has brought prosperity only to a minority of the
world population, and without firmer guarantees many countries
began to agree with the view that "no deal is better than a bad deal", writes David Loyn.
30th July 08 - David Loyn, BBC News
There was no doubting the intensity of emotion on the faces of
negotiators who had stared each other out over the past nine days.
They had reached their bottom lines and had concluded agreement -
until they came to item 18 out of 20 on the "to do" list being worked
through by Pascal Lamy, the head of the World Trade Organisation.
The issue where they could not bridge the gap was so-called
special safeguard mechanisms - the ability of developing countries to
impose temporary tariff barriers to control prices or block import
surges - an insurance policy for hard times.
Describing himself "distressed" by the failure of the talks,
Brazil's Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said it was "unbelievable that
we failed on one issue".
With the US on one side trying to prevent these barriers, and China
and India on the other wanting to put them up, the talks hit what the
EU's trade negotiator Peter Mandelson said was an "irresistible force
meeting an immovable object".
His US counterpart, Susan Schwab, said the US "remained
committed to the Doha round" and that it was "most unfortunate" that a
deal could not be done.
Turning point
Given the context of rising fuel and food prices and economic
uncertainty, it was perhaps not the best time to expect nations to take
a leap of faith to open up their markets.
They want the maximum ability to protect their own populations in an increasingly volatile world.
However, the problem is that liberalisation in world trade over
recent decades has brought prosperity only to a minority of the
population of the world, and without firmer guarantees many countries
began to agree with the view that "no deal is better than a bad deal".
But it was not just the issue of special safeguard mechanisms that wrecked the round.
There has been no agreement on how to level trading terms for
banana-exporting nations, while the concerns of African
cotton-producing countries about US subsidies for its cotton farmers
were not even addressed.
A passionate believer in trade as an instrument of development,
Pascal Lamy told the BBC that it was developing countries that would
lose out because of the collapse of the round.
He said he would try to restart talks and salvage something from the wreckage, but the political will for a deal has evaporated.
Geneva marked a historic turning point in more ways than one.
For the first time since World War II, the world turned its back
on the process of liberalisation that has been the engine of the huge
increase in trade in goods and services during the years of
globalisation.
The talks also saw an emerging new architecture in relations
between world powers, with alliances between China, India and Brazil
more important than their relations with traditional Western countries.
After failure in Geneva it is hard to see how any life can be
breathed into the corpse of a round of negotiations that was launched
in Doha in 2001 with the hope of improving terms of trade for the
developing world.
Africa, the poorest continent on the planet, was not even represented in the inner circle of talks by the end.
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Doha Round Crumbles to Dust
30th July 08 - Gustavo Capdevila, IPS news
The Doha Round of multilateral trade talks was
brought crashing down late Tuesday by the same discrepancies between
rich and poor countries that have marked the nearly seven years of
negotiations from the start.
An insurmountable rift between
the United States on one hand and China and India on the other ended
the emergency conference of ministers called by the World Trade
Organisation (WTO), which had stretched into its ninth day of sessions.
Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana interpreted the
collapse of the talks as the failure of an attempt by industrialised
countries to give very little and ask for a lot, which was simply not
accepted, in general terms, by the developing countries, he told IPS.
What ultimately sparked this international disaster was an
issue that is dear to developing countries: the establishment of a
mechanism of special safeguards that would allow developing countries
to raise tariffs on farm imports when they reached a certain level and
began to threaten the livelihoods of poor farmers
"It is unbelievable that we have failed over one issue. Not that the
issue is not important for some countries, but many other much more
intractable issues were overcome," said Brazilian Foreign Minister
Celso Amorim.
WTO Director General Pascal Lamy said that agreements had been
reached on 18 issues out of a list of 20, but that the gap could not be
closed on number 19.
The United States opposed the safeguard clauses, arguing that
they could give rise to abuses, while China and India demanded the
mechanism as a way of defending livelihoods, food security and rural
development for farmers in developing countries.
The difference kept the ministers from the roughly 30
countries who met last week and the representatives of the rest of the
WTO’s 153 member states from reaching an agreement on the parameters
for talks on agriculture and non-agricultural market access (NAMA, or
industrial products).
Conceived in the Qatari capital in November 2001 with the aim
of sending a message of solidarity to a world shaken by the 9/11
terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the Doha Round of talks
is failing against a backdrop of threats of new crises, involving food
and oil prices and climate change.
"In the face of a global food price crisis, we simply could
not agree to a result that would raise more barriers to world food
trade," said U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab.
Carin Smaller, of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade
Policy (IATP), said "the U.S. argued that opening markets was the best
way to achieve food security and to promote livelihoods."
"India and China, in contrast, with the support of the majority of
developing country members, argued for a strong safeguard mechanism to
protect food security and livelihoods in the event of major disruptions
to agriculture markets, she said.
Mexico’s deputy Finance Minister Beatriz Leycegui said that
the failure of the Doha Round is a loss to the whole world, because it
comes at a time of severe economic crisis, in the midst of
protectionism and loss of credibility for the multilateral system.
Under these conditions, reaching an agreement was urgent, she said.
Lamy accepted that the Doha meeting had collapsed. "We will have to let
the dust settle a bit," he said about future WTO negotiations. However,
he insisted that he had not "thrown in the towel."
Alfredo Chiaradía, secretary of international trade relations
at the Argentine Foreign Ministry, said that in the last meeting of
ministers Tuesday, some expressed an interest in attempting to revive
the talks.
Leycegui said Mexico had insisted on not "tossing in the
garbage everything that has been achieved" in the nine days of
negotiations. "It is frustrating because we thought an agreement was
near, but political commitment was lacking," she added.
Anne-Laure Constantin, another IATP expert, told IPS that she
hoped that the WTO member countries "will be creative enough to think
about another way to address trade at the multilateral level, which is
more adapted to the new conditions and really helps countries deal with
the crises they have to face in food, energy and climate.’’
The Doha talks were supposed to be a development round, to
favour the poorest countries, which makes their failure especially
frustrating, said Taiana.
Jeremy Hobbs, director of Oxfam International, said "This is a major
disappointment. At a time when food and fuel prices are high and the
global economic outlook is uncertain, the world's poorest people are
increasingly vulnerable. A decent trade deal could have given them a
chance to prevent worsening poverty."
Aftab Alam Khan of ActionAid, said "The responsibility for the
failure lies squarely with the U.S. and EU, who could not think beyond
the interests of their huge transnational businesses that want to grab
more and more market opportunities in poor countries. For the U.S. and
the EU to blame China and India for the collapse is just laughable."
In Amorim’s view, "any outside observer would not believe that after the progress made we were not able to conclude the talks."
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