[APWW-Meet] Doha Round Crumbles to Dust

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Multilateral Trade Talks
Doha Round Crumbles to Dust
By Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jul 29 (IPS) - 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 industrialized 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=20
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.=20

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
Chiarada, 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 country, 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."
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