WTO suggests a partial Doha deal sans consensus

WTO Director General Pascal Lamy has made a plea to the member countries to agree on a step-by-step deal to open the global trade even if the full scale agreement under the Doha Round is not achievable.

"If not the full Round, at least an early harvest of it as a credible signal of the rest to come at a later stage, when the politics of the Round would have aligned," Lamy said here after an informal meeting of the trade ministers of key WTO member countries.

Ministers from countries like Australia, India, China, and Brazil participated in the meeting, held on the sidelines of an OECD meet.

Lamy said the Doha Round negotiations remain stuck because of "an unbridgeable gap in the level of ambition in industrial tariff cuts between major economies, which prevents progress," claiming that the differences are "political" and not technical.

He pleaded with the ministers to explore options that would deliver results before the 8th WTO Ministerial Conference in Geneva in December.

India's Commerce and industry Minister Anand Sharma said there was an agreement to help the least-developed countries (LDCs) giving more market access to them.

"There is a broad consensus to work on the LDC issues," Sharma told PTI after attending the meeting hosted by Australia.

Australia's trade minister Craig Emerson concurred with Sharma's assessment, suggesting that there was a "high level of agreement to work on the developmental issues concerning the LDCs".

Further, several ministers pointed out the need to strengthen the World Trade Organisation. Too much energy and resources were being spent on the protracted and faltering Doha Round of negotiations in the last ten years.

Effectively, it was conceded that a multi-lateral trade agreement would not be concluded this year as planned earlier because of unbridgeable differences.