Breakthrough on Doha, talks to resume on Sept 14

Still tough nuts to crack, says WTO Director-General Lamy

The two-day informal meeting of trade ministers has broken the impasse that engulfed the Doha Round of global trade talks under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) last year, Minister of Commerce and Industry Anand Sharma said today.

Chief negotiators will now meet on September 14 to restart the stalled talks with the December texts as basis of discussions. Talks had collapsed in Geneva in July last year after India, among others, opposed agriculture subsidies offered by rich nations to their farmers on the grounds that this distorts trade by making produce of developing countries costly.

The objective of the Delhi meeting that concluded today was to develop a broad-based consensus to remove the impediments to multilateral discussions and to provide clear directions to negotiators to re-energise the multilateral process at the WTO.

“There has been a breakthrough in this meeting. The impasse in resuming the negotiations has been broken. It has been agreed by all that with a strong consensus the chief negotiators and senior officials will meet in Geneva on September 14 to restart the entire process,” Sharma said in his briefing after the conclusion of the meeting.

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, however, asserted that a successful conclusion of the Doha negotiations still has a long way to go. “There are still tough nuts to crack in this negotiation. And we should not underestimate this,” said Lamy, while briefing the media after the Delhi meeting.

The Indian government had earlier clarified that the meeting, in which negotiators came from over 35 countries, would focus on “process rather than content” so that stalemate on specific issues were avoided.

Sharma added the meeting would go a long way in bringing the stalled Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations to a successful conclusion. “This meeting has given a message of the commitment of the countries represented here, irrespective of the substantive gaps in negotiations in Geneva, to take the Doha round to its successful conclusion.”

The minister also said the meeting could successfully uphold two of India’s strongest stands - development concern of the developing economies and inclusiveness.

“All the participants made it clear that the mandate of the Doha round is development. Inclusiveness was also reflected in the participation. The ministers endorsed various affirmations made earlier. The ministers of a larger coalition have met and we have reached an agreement to intensify the negotiations,” he said.

Last month, the government had clarified its “inclusiveness” stand for the informal meeting by saying that the concerns of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small and Vulnerable Economies (SVEs) should be high on the agenda of global trade talks.

Another major breakthrough that the Delhi summit could achieve was to generate a broad-based consensus among the negotiators upon the need to avoid any change in the basic and already-agreed-upon texts of the negotiating round.

“It has been agreed, what has been in conformity with India’s and other coalition partners stand in the developing countries, that much has been invested in the last seven years in the negotiations of the Doha round. Therefore the same sequence (of priority issues) has to be respected,” Sharma said. Lately, there have been calls from some quart0ers of the global trade negotiators to take a re-look at the sequence of priority issues to be discussed under the trade talks, as recommended by the Hong Kong declaration.

He also added that agreement could also be achieved in the meeting on accepting the draft reports on Agriculture and Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) given by the chairs last year as the base document for the resumption of the negotiations, “acknowledging the progress therefore made by the negotiators until December 2008”.

Clarifying that participants in the meeting agreed unanimously that only the “multilateral” approach will drive the negotiations in future, Sharma said other processes like bilaterals and plurilaterals would only feed into and would remain “adjunct” to the multilateral process.

Finally, the participating trade ministers also agreed to review the progress of discussions once the chief negotiators and senior officials meet and to adhere to the timeline given by the leaders to complete the Doha process by 2010.