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| Doha talks stalled in Geneva despite Delhi meeting |
| D Ravi Kanth / Geneva Sep 21, 2009, 00:11 IST |
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Key World Trade Organisation (WTO) members failed to make any progress in the stalled Doha trade negotiations last week, casting a huge cloud over the 2010 deadline for concluding the Round, several trade diplomats told Business Standard.
During a closed-door green room meeting with select trade envoys last Friday, WTO chief Pascal Lamy admitted that political signals issued by trade ministers and leaders to conclude the Doha trade negotiations sometime in 2010 were not translated into action in Geneva.
Green room meetings refer to meetings of 20 to 40 delegations, usually at the level of heads of delegations, in the director-general’s conference room. Green room is the informal name given to this room.
Lamy intends to convey the grim message to G-20 leaders when they meet in Pittsburgh this week that without quick and rapid action, the chances of concluding the Doha trade negotiations next year are bleak, trade envoys said.
Despite the high-profile New Delhi ministerial meeting earlier this month, which called on the senior officials from key WTO member countries to address outstanding issues in the Doha menu on a war footing, there was no “substantive progress because the United States is still not in a position to negotiate,” a South American trade envoy said.
Senior trade officials from around 11 countries — the United States, European Union, Brazil, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Mexico among them — met last week to explore how they could resolve their differences.
But the two-day meeting was bogged in addressing concepts such as what "no surprises" means and so on, with the negotiating ground being reduced to the US on one side and the other 10 countries on the other, trade officials said.
Several trade officials from emerging countries — China, India, and Argentina among others — shared a similar assessment, saying there is no substantive movement based on the chair’s texts issued in December 2008, Business Standard was told.
Carol Guthrie, spokesperson for the United States Trade Representative, however, maintained Washington is particularly pleased with the broad recognition emerging from the Senior Official consultations that, in addition to re-energising the multilateral negotiating process, "an important element of moving Doha forward will be for key members to begin a sustained bilateral engagement to assess the nature of the gaps that exist and address them — particularly with regard to market-opening contributions under Doha by key emerging markets.”
The US, which refuses to consider the two draft texts of December 2008 as the basis for negotiations, wants substantial market-opening contributions from emerging countries like China, India, Brazil and South Africa in agriculture and industrial goods.
It wants China and India, the two biggest emerging countries, to join zero-for-zero tariff elimination talks on chemical, industrial and industrial engineering products.
Washington has also pressed for high thresholds to avail of the special safeguard mechanism to curb unforeseen imports of agricultural products by China and India and also indicate which farm tariff lines will be exempted from tariff cuts under what are called super special products.
A Chinese official told Business Standard that Beijing conveyed to the US last week that it would not accept the demand to join sectoral tariff elimination in chemicals, industrial products and industrial engineering products. Beijing is also not ready to agree to tough conditions on how to avail of the special safeguard mechanism, the official said.
India, meanwhile, is yet to secure any relief on its major demands like simple rules to implement the special safeguard mechanism or any significant market access for its short-term services providers in the US and other major industrialised country markets, senior diplomats said.
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