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A July-end deadline for finalizing a detailed work programme for agreeing new rules for liberalization of global trade will now be missed, the chief of the World Trade Organization (WTO) told international diplomats, prompting India and other developing nations to blame unnamed industrialized nations.
The failure to finalize the work programme casts serious doubts on WTO’s ability to wrap up negotiations on the Doha Development Agenda, launched in the Qatari capital in 2001 to update the rules of world trade, at the trade body’s 10th ministerial conference in Nairobi, Kenya, later in the year.
The Doha Round negotiations were initially scheduled to be concluded by 1 January 2005. But inflexible positions adopted by a number of countries have stalled negotiations.
At a heads of delegations meeting on Wednesday evening, WTO director general Roberto Azevedo informed diplomats that agreeing a work programme with precise modalities by the end of July is not possible because of “lack of convergence” on the agreements on agriculture, market access for industrial goods and services.
“Whether we can deliver a work programme is in the hands of the members and their ability to bring forward new proposals in the coming days which will pave the way to find consensus,” Azevedo said.
Early this year, Azevedo announced that the Doha Round will be concluded at the 10th ministerial conference beginning on 15 December.
Azevedo had proposed a “doability” criteria with “alternative approaches” and “alternative paths” for accomplishing “a clear, detailed, modalities-like work programme” by end-July.
The director general also suggested major changes, moving away from previously agreed mandates during closed door negotiations with seven major industrialized and developing countries—the US, the European Union, China, India, Brazil, Australia, and Japan—people familiar the meetings said.
A large number of developing countries—India, Turkey; Barbados on behalf of the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific group of around 90 countries; Lesotho on behalf of the African Group; and Uganda, and Indonesia on behalf of the G-33 coalition of 46 countries—expressed concern at the failure to draw-up the work programme based on existing mandates.
“A handful of members who have been espousing the need for recalibration or simplification seem desirous of moving the discussions away not only from the 2008 texts but also perhaps from all previous mandates,” said India’s trade envoy Anjali Prasad at the Wednesday meeting.
Without naming the countries, she said the proponents of recalibration are redefining “their terms of engagement on the pre-condition that a couple of developing country members agree to undertake higher contributions vis-à-vis the rest.”
“Such conditionalities are unprecedented as a gateway,” she said. “Recalibration or simplification should not result in the rewriting of mandates contained in the Doha declaration and elucidated further in the (2004) July Framework and (2005) Hong Kong Declaration.”
“But we are very alarmed that Special and Differential Treatment—a core principle of the GATT (WTO’s predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the WTO and informing all pillars of the negotiations—is being viewed by some as a threshold issue now,” Prasad argued.
Reiterating India’s frequently-stated position, she said developing countries are being asked to “make bigger contributions in some areas while the depth of obligations of developed country members is sought to be reduced”.
The manner in which the building blocks of the 2008 revised draft modalities in agriculture are being “diluted or dropped” selectively on the ground that they are not doable while insisting on bigger commitments in industrial goods underline a complete “asymmetry” in these two critical areas, India said.
“We would reject approaches that would put us in a position as taking part in a “collective” decision to deny ourselves the much needed reform—which is akin to swallowing a poisonous pill,” said ambassador Christopher Onyanga Aparr of Uganda.
The US also expressed “major disappointment” with the failure to finalize the work programme.
Washington wants China and India to undertake commitments for reducing their farm subsidies—even though the two countries are exempt from doing so. The US domestic farm bill for the next five years contains subsidy programmes that are inconsistent with the Doha mandates. Therefore, it wants a work programme without complying with the previous mandates, said a trade envoy who asked not to be quoted.
Source: livemint.com