WTO countries endorse high-stakes Doha round push

Governments negotiating a new global trade treaty on Friday endorsed a high-stakes push to save the World Trade Organisation's Doha round next month, despite concerns that it may be premature.
WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy earlier this week called for ministers to meet from July 21 to seek a deal in farming and manufacturing - the two toughest areas of the long-running talks - in a bid to clinch an overall pact in 2008. The 152 WTO countries backed what trade experts said was a "make-or-break" test of the seven-year drive to cut tariffs and subsidies that pinch exporters and constrain growth.
"It's clearly risky," said David Woods, a trade analyst and former WTO spokesman, who warned that diplomats in Geneva needed to overcome huge obstacles in their often-complex negotiations before ministers could be expected to reach any agreement. "Either they make a tremendous amount of progress in the next few weeks or they do not. If that progress is not forthcoming there is no way this deal can be done in four or five days," Woods said, refering to the ministerial meeting.
Former WTO services director David Hartridge said Lamy's decision was "a brave but necessary thing to do". But he said it would be hard to broker a deal to open markets in goods ranging from coffee to cotton and cars unless diplomats could resolve stark differences in technical areas of the talks.
"There are still a lot of outstanding points, and you can't put too many such matters to a short meeting of ministers," said Hartridge, now a trade adviser for the law firm White and Case. "The chance of a successful ministerial depends very much on the ability of senior officials to dispose of some of the outstanding issues before ministers come to Geneva," he said.
Economists believe a deal in the Doha round, launched in the Qatari capital in November 2001, would spur billions of dollars of cross-border commercial flows and avert scores of disputes over the use of tariffs, subsidies, and sanctions. It could also lead to job losses in economic sectors that are now protected from international competition by tariffs and subsidies which would be cut or capped under an accord.
Much of the contention in the Geneva talks is related to which farmers and manufacturers countries may exempt from cuts. Lamy, a Frenchman and ex-European Union trade chief, wants to reach a Doha deal this year, before the US presidential election, giving a shot in the arm for the troubled global economy.
But with US President George W. Bush lacking authority from Congress to approve a deal, diplomats said Washington's ability to negotiate meaningfully was in doubt. And developing nations' demands for more access to wealthy farm markets, in exchange for opening up their manufacturing sectors, hit resistance last week when French President Nicolas Sarkozy criticised plans to cut European farm import tariffs.
France said on Friday it would chair a special meeting of European Union foreign ministers to address concerns among several EU countries about the deal shaping up in Geneva, just days before the WTO ministerial discussions next month. Woods said Lamy must be ready to use the July meeting as a chance to freeze-dry what has already been agreed in the Doha talks, which need consensus in all negotiating areas.
"There needs to be a Plan B, even if it is not public," Woods said. "He needs at the back of his mind a fall-back position that would safeguard what has been achieved and leave open the possibility of a serious re-launch, perhaps with a slightly different mandate, next year."