Chair punctures WTO chief's assumptions

The chair for Doha agriculture negotiations Ambassador Crawford Falconer has issued a report dispelling the notion that the special safeguard mechanism (SSM) was at the root of the breakdown of the mini-ministerial meeting a fortnight ago.

The report says there are three or four other issues, particularly cotton, which need to be addressed.

At the time of the failure of the meeting, WTO Director General Pascal Lamy had said that there was enormous progress except on the SSM for developing countries.

In sharp contrast, the chair said efforts should be made at the level of senior officials without “waiting for divine interventions from Olympus,” suggesting that ministerial meetings were not the best occasions to resolve differences. Lamy had invested heavily in the ministerial meetings.

Last month’s ministerial meeting came to a halt because of differences between the United States and its farm exporting allies on one side, and India, China, Indonesia and around 90 developing countries over the trigger and remedies to be used for the SSM to curb import surges.

Ambassador Falconer said there were “unbridgeable differences regarding the triggers for breaching the pre-Doha bound rate.” “The other key questions of how far you could go above that rate and how often you could do it could not be a source of any convergence in the absence of any common ground on the fundamental issue of what conditions would need to be met for you to even breach it in the first place,” he said.

“It is perhaps worth underlining that such differences were not purely ‘technical’ matter”, the chair said, arguing that “of course, like all fundamental political differences, there are consequent technical differences, but the impasse was not technical.”

Ambassador Falconer argued that the breakdown was largely bordered on a political divide. “So illusion number one to guard against is that it can be resolved essentially technically,” he said, suggesting that “the technicalities will need to be addressed but will only work with the same level of political investment that was evident in many other issues where technical and political are inseparable”.

He said issues such as tariff simplification, creation of tariff rate quotas, and other issues also can prove to be deal breakers.