A flurry of high-level visits to the WTO over the past week has done little to drive forward sluggish talks on tearing down barriers to commerce and have left observers suffering from a sense of deja vu.
Senior government officials traded stern warnings in recent days about the World Trade Organisation's 149-nation Doha Round talks.
Statements about an impending "moment of truth", the need for "ambition", "realism" and "political will" abounded, as well as claims that the European Union bore particular responsibility for ending the deadlock.
Such refrains, which leave WTO-watchers anxiously reading between the lines to find a hint of something new, have become commonplace during five years of stop-start global trade talks.
The round, launched in the Qatari capital Doha in late 2001, marked a drive to smash trade hurdles and harness global commerce to boost the economies of poor countries.
Despite intermittent progress at smoothing some differences last year, the talks have yet to get anywhere on the fundamental issues that have dogged the round from the outset.
They include the depth of market-opening concessions by Western countries to the developing world, what poor nations must do in return, and which rich governments should do the most.
In the weeks leading up to an April 30 deadline, negotiators acknowledged that an accord on the mathematics for cutting customs duties and other trade hurdles was still beyond reach and decided to drop the target.
That intermediate goal was agreed upon barely five months ago at a ministerial meeting in Hong Kong.
On Monday, WTO chief Pascal Lamy warned negotiators that they had "no more time to spare", calling for "meaningful progress" within "weeks rather than months".
A handful of key players came to Geneva in the first half of the week for a meeting that - in public - they said they had simply taken stock of the state of play.
Washington's team included outgoing US Trade Representative Rob Portman and his deputy and expected successor Susan Schwab.
They met with Lamy, Australian Minister for Trade Mark Vaile, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim and Shoichi Nakagawa, the agriculture minister of Japan.
EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson did not travel to Geneva, but Portman and Amorim both said they had spoken with him by telephone.
"We believe that there is a way for us to get to a yes and to come up with a successful conclusion of the round," Portman told reporters after meeting with Lamy.
He later said it was up the EU to offer deeper cuts in its import duties on farm goods than those it has already put on the table. In a joint statement, Portman and Vaile said the EU held the key to the talks.
The United States has been hammering home that message since October, when it offered to cut much-criticised subsidies to US farmers if the EU reciprocated.
Portman and Vaile said that they welcomed signs that Brussels was prepared to go further - a nod to Mandelson's recent remark that "if key partners put something worthwhile on the table, the EU will be prepared to further enhance our current agricultural offer".
Amorim, a key representative in the G20 group of developing countries, also hailed "indications of flexibilities" but declined to say from whom.
He also said that any final accord "will have to be in the neighbourhood" of the trade barrier cuts proposed by developing countries.
It was unclear whether such comments meant that a compromise was on the cards, or was simply part of the seemingly permanent verbal jousting at the WTO.
Negotiators are trying to catch up before a July 31 deadline for laying down how governments would implement the final Doha Round treaty.
Trading nations have a history of missing their targets, whether at the WTO or its pre-1995 predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT): this round of barrier removal was meant to end in 2004.
But they are now facing extra pressure to seal a deal by December, because of fears of what may happen after July 2007 when the White House is expected to lose its special negotiating authority.
A traditionally sceptical Congress will then regain its power to knock down trade deals involving the United States.
The WTO operates by consensus and any member - let alone such a key player as the world's largest trading nation - could block a final treaty.
Concerns are mounting that if the Doha Round fails to end soon, governments will shift their focus away from the multilateral talks and back to bilateral and regional trade deals.
These are often criticised for creating a complex "spaghetti bowl" of competing interests in the world and of putting developing countries at a disadvantage in their trade relations with powerful nations.
Comments
Comments are closed.