WTO Talks, in Crisis, Risk Collapse Without Progress
bloomberg.com
July 1 (Bloomberg) -- World Trade Organization talks aimed at fixing a ``user manual'' for an eventual global accord unraveled as governments failed to make any new concessions, threatening to undermine the five-year-old negotiations.
Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath left the talks, scheduled to end tomorrow, as U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said the meeting had hit ``an impasse'' over closing loopholes that would allow both rich and emerging economies to shield certain commodities from tariff cuts.
WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said trade ministers failed to engage in negotiations to lower farm subsidies and tariffs on industrial goods. That's a prerequisite for the organization's 149 governments to meet a July 31 deadline to submit their legally binding commodity and product-specific pledges for trimming import duties and subsidies.
``There has been no progress and therefore we are in a crisis,'' Lamy told a news conference as the meeting wrapped up. ``I still believe the differences and the gaps are not unbridgeable. It is crisis, but not yet panic.''
Negotiators have failed twice, in December and April, to produce such a blueprint, part of an eventual accord the World Bank says would add at least $96 billion to the global economy.
Lamy to Mediate
Lamy said governments had asked him to act as a ``catalyst'' to help them broker a deal. ``I still believe it's technically possible,'' he said. ``If I had the view it was not technically possible, I would not take the risk'' of agreeing to mediate.
Lamy has said ``he doesn't have any cards in his pocket,'' Brazil's Foreign Minister Celso Amorim told reporters. ``But probably he knows better than anyone else what others have in their pocket.''
While the meeting that began two days ago ``has not been successful, it has not been a disaster'' either, European Union Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson told a journalists. Still, ``if we do not turn things around in the next two weeks, we will not reach a breakthrough by summer and then we will be facing defeat,'' he added.
With other issues -- such as opening commercial services to foreign competition, easing red-tape at customs, paring subsidies to fishing fleets that undermine marine stocks and improving rules on anti-dumping duties -- also due for completion by the end of the month, there will be a ``traffic jam,'' in the talks, Lamy reiterated after the meetings.
A Failure
``There is no need to pretend that this has not been a failure,'' Nath told a news conference in Geneva before he left. ``It'll be a great pretense if we were to say this has been successful.''
Brazil and India balked at calls by the European Union and U.S. to make new concessions to lower their customs tariffs on consumer and industrial goods, which they say are needed to protect emerging industries.
Mandelson has said he's prepared to move ``toward, or close to'' the tariff cuts on farm products proposed by Brazil and India, while the U.S. says its offer to slash agricultural spending and import duties, put forward in October, is a generous one that needs no improvement until others move.
Talks have focused on a range of measures that countries would be able to use to exempt certain farm products from steep tariff reductions.
Schwab described the measures as ``loopholes'' and said that during talks, ``we did not find closure or narrow the range in any one of those. The experience of the last several days has been somewhat disheartening,'' she told journalists in Geneva. ``Clearly we have reached an impasse.'' |
