The Hindu Business Line : Doha Roundabout

Late last week in London, the Union Commerce Minister, Mr Kamal Nath, said that there were about 150 “points of conflict” in the farm sector, which should be brought down to at least 50 before Ministers of the WTO member-countries could meet and try to get the Doha Round going once again. Given this formidable task, it is clear that the holding of a “mini-Ministerial” in the last week of March is no longer possible and that the outlook for a complet ion of the WTO negotiations is, at the least, bleak.

The point of concern is that the problems in the way of clinching an agreement on the Doha Round have been there right from day one (that is, more than six years ago, when the talks began after the fourth WTO Ministerial conference held in Doha in November 2001), with two deadlines — the original one of January 1, 2005 and the unofficial target of end-2006 — passing without any substantive progress in overcoming the obstacles. Thus, it would be nothing short of a miracle if, in the course of the next three weeks, a worthwhile initiative suddenly materialises and produces results which have for long eluded the best international trade negotiators.

Admittedly, a hastily arranged patch-up is possible but, as New Delhi has warned, any “accord” must stand or fall on its contents and not on its scheduling. In fact, the strongest signal that the Doha Round talks were as good as dead was hoisted last June, when the G-4 Potsdam negotiations (among the US, the EU, India and Brazil) collapsed, with the Commerce Minister stating unambiguously that the developed countries were looking “at promoting and protecting the prosperity of their farmers” while in India the effort was to protect “the livelihood of our farmers”. The blame was put on Brazil and India for not being flexible, the point being conveniently overlooked that the rich economies were expected to sacrifice a proportionately larger part of their economic interest compared to the poor in terms of the Doha Development Agenda. The gulf between the two sides is still so wide that while, last week, Mr Kamal Nath focussed on the problems in the farm sphere, the EU Trade Commissioner, Mr Peter Mandelson, said he was more worried about the differences on issues pertaining to trade in industrial goods. The responses indicate that the revised agriculture and non-agricultural market access (NAMA) drafts, released last month by the chairmen of the respective WTO negotiating groups in Geneva, have made no effective progress.

Does this mean the end of the road for the WTO? Not quite because while the Doha Round has failed to make progress till now, trade liberalisation measures distilled from the earlier rounds remain in force — rules and guidelines that can still be used by aggrieved parties to seek redress from the WTO’s dispute resolution bodies. Instructively, the latest beneficiaries have been both the developed and developing worlds, the US, the EU and Canada winning their case against Chinese auto-part import tariffs, and India and Thailand having their stand on US import conditions for shrimp exports upheld.

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