Australia has abandoned its position as a global free trade pioneer to pursue one-off deals with its major export partners as negotiators meet in Geneva this week to revive stalled World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks on agriculture.
Flushed with success at negotiating a free trade agreement with the United States, Trade Minister Mark Vaile said he was determined to pursue a similar deal with China and other partners.
Vaile said free trade deals with other major trading countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Gulf nations including Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates were also in the pipeline, although he admitted some would be hard to achieve.
Vaile dropped his previously optimistic attitude to WTO attempts at freeing up agricultural trade in talks Monday in Geneva.
"I don't like our chances," Vaile said last week when asked if WTO talks would result in a long-awaited breakthrough on the Doha negotiations on agricultural free trade scheduled for completion by the end of this year.
Vaile said the failure of meetings in Cancun, Mexico, last year had dented hopes of securing concessions from major powers like the European Union, Japan and South Korea, which he has previously criticised for intransigence on farm subsidies.
"Sometimes you travel to the other side of the world and you belt away at these meetings like we did in Cancun and you end up at the end of the week absolutely dog tired and none the smarter, the wiser or richer, and you come home and say 'jeez is any of this worth it'?" he told Australian Associated Press. "But you've just got to keep doing it." Former Australian trade negotiator Jane Drake-Brockman said it was a major concession from a country that has been at the vanguard of the push for global agricultural free trade though its leadership of the Cairns Group of 17 agricultural exporting countries.
"The only way to achieve free trade is through discipline at Geneva," she told AFP."
Wolfgang Kasper from the Sydney-based think tank the Centre for Independent Studies said bilateral trade deals invigorated negotiations for a multi-lateral deal through the WTO.
"It shows trade blocs, like the EU, they're painting themselves into a corner by their intransigence on agriculture," he said.
Australian National University economics lecturer John Gage said bilateral agreements meant international trade agreements would be bogged down in bureaucratic details.
Drake-Brockman said bilateral agreements would not energise moves to a multi-lateral trade agreement on agriculture through the WTO.
She said the idea that bilateral agreements encouraged multi-lateral agreements defied economic common-sense.
"It's like you're walking in the opposite direction from where you want to go in the hope you'll eventually get there," she said. "It has no basis in economic theory." "Look at the free trade agreement Australia reached with Washington, there's nothing there on agriculture.