US and EU pursued own interests at WTO meet: Oxfam

The United States and the European Union nearly wrecked the World Trade Organisation's Hong Kong conference last week by pursuing their own interests at the expense of poor countries, Oxfam said on Wednesday.
And unless the two trade powers change their ways in the coming months, the WTO's troubled Doha Round, due to end with a new global pact by the end of next year, could drag on into the next decade, the international aid body said.
"The WTO Hong Kong ministerial meeting was a lost opportunity to make trade fairer for poor people around the world," Oxfam said in a 20-page report on the gathering.
"Rich countries put their commercial interests before those of developing countries," the report said.
Oxfam's International Executive Director Jeremy Hobbs pinned the blame for what even WTO officials have agreed was a meagre outcome firmly on the 25-nation EU and the United States and their stance on farm trade.
Hobbs said in a statement with the report that assertions by EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson that the Union had helped save the talks from a collapse similar to earlier meetings in Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003 were "ludicrous".
"The fact is that the talks were log-jammed between EU and US self-interest," he added, and said the final declaration - with an EU pledge to end farm export subsidies by 2013 - was only approved because poorer countries feared a worse outcome.
"Everyone wanted to avoid a total collapse for fear of terminally damaging the WTO, and rich countries played this card in putting pressure on developing countries to sign a deal."
Oxfam comments and analyses on international trade are generally treated with some respect since the British-based body, with a battery of development economists on its staff, is not a hard-line critic of the WTO.
It generally focuses its fire on the role of the big powers in the 149-member Geneva-based body. In Hong Kong, it said, the rich nations failed to deliver on promises made in 2001 that the Doha Round would be focused on boosting development.
Unless the United States and the EU made genuine offers when the round resumes next month to reform their farm subsidy systems and open their markets wider to goods from developing countries, "then the talks could drag on into the next decade".