The proposals in the two texts on agriculture and industrial products will become the basis for further negotiations. If all goes well, Lamy wants to hold his much-planned ministerial meeting around June 23 to finalise what are called modalities or parameters. They would suggest the figures for tariff and subsidy cuts in agriculture and tariff cuts in industrial products for members barring the poorest ones.

But there is consternation all around, at least in the arena of market-opening for industrial products. Privately, many members acknowledged an evolutionary pattern in the agriculture proposals notwithstanding certain major omissions and commissions. Ironically, those on the industrial goods presented a pattern that looked somewhat like the travails of Muhammad bin Tughluq (1325-1351) when he forcibly moved the entire population of Delhi to the new capital of Daulatabad and then brought them back to Delhi after two years. It is well-known that the "brilliant" plan of Tughluq proved to be a disaster, resulting in the deaths of a large number of people.

Such a prospect now haunts the non-agricultural market access (NAMA) negotiations. The learned chair responsible for the negotiations to liberalise global trade in industrial goods first produced a text based on what he thought is the best course for members, without incorporating proposals that would have truly reflected the democratic-cum-multilateral credentials of the negotiations. Therefore, he chose to simply exclude proposals from a majority of members without any rationale . He even recommended that ministers "adopt the first of Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People — to start with the end in mind" by removing the water between the bound applied and bound tariffs in developing countries to below 12 per cent, with a handful above 15 per cent. In trade jargon, removing water would imply closing the gap between what a country could do as per its WTO commitments and what it is currently doing. A coefficient between eight and nine in what is called the Swiss formula was proposed for industrialised countries, which have relatively low tariffs, except for some peak tariffs in textiles, clothing and leather items, among others. The developing countries were asked to accept a coefficient between 19 and 23 along with flexibilities to shelter certain tariffs. A higher coefficient would yield a lower cut under this arrangement and conversely, a lower coefficient would result in a higher cut.

On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with such a plan, but the problem is it came too close to the demands of the big boys in the global trading system — the US and EU. The draft mentioned helping some members like South Africa who faced certain peculiar problems because of the Southern African Customs Union, but the chair admitted that "an exception based on regional trade arrangements would establish a very difficult precedent in multilateral trade negotiations."

As expected, these proposals, which were at variance with what the Doha Development Agenda had intended to accomplish, raised an unseemly situation. Several developing countries refused to accept them because they did not adhere to the principle of less than full reciprocity or the level of comparability between what is being offered in agriculture and industrial goods. The main problem with the first draft is that it turned the developing countries from being gainers in the Doha Round into payers by forcing onerous commitments as proposed by the big boys.

In February this year, a revised text — which ought to have addressed the deficiencies in the first text — repeated the same mistakes on a bigger scale. It simply brought some new linkages between the formula for cutting industrial tariffs and the flexibilities for developing countries.

Against this backdrop, a second revised text was issued last week ostensibly to address the concerns of many members. This time, many proposals from aggrieved developing countries such as Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Mexico, Fiji, Pakistan and so on, were incorporated. Instead of some two dozen "square issues" (which mean unresolved problems), the text now contains around 90 issues with serious systemic implications. The moot issue is why did the chair not include these proposals in the first text in July 2007? When it is clear as daylight that the negotiations to finalise the parameters will have to be done in the next four weeks, why did the chair wake up at the twelfth hour? Only he can tell what went behind the scenes 24 hours before he tabled the second revised text.