The Doha Round. Time to rev the engine

The global trade talks urgently need some political oomph

LIKE a clapped-out car, the Doha round of global trade talks seem to be stalled more often than not. Some breakdowns are spectacular, such as the acrimonious collapse of the Cancun meeting of trade ministers in September 2003. At other times, the talks simply lose all momentum. That is the situation today. Negotiations on farm trade are suspended over a technical dispute and the haggling over how to liberalise trade in industrial goods and services is going nowhere. Next week, trade ministers from many of the World Trade Organisation's most important countries will meet in Paris. These ministers need to kick the Doha talks back into gear. Time is running out for a successful completion of the round.

That may sound alarmist. After all, previous trade rounds have dragged on for years. But that is unlikely to happen this time. George Bush's fast-track negotiating authority - which limits the ability of America's Congress to unravel any trade agreement - runs out in July 2007. Mr Bush barely won initial congressional approval for fast-track. Given rising protectionist sentiments among American lawmakers, another renewal two years from now looks extremely unlikely.

That suggests that any Doha agreement must be signed by early 2007 at the latest. Conventional wisdom among trade boffins is that it takes a year to wrap up a trade negotiation once the big political breakthroughs have been made. On this calculation, the WTO's ministerial gathering in Hong Kong in December 2005 is the real deadline for a big Doha deal.

With little more than six months to go, such a deal is nowhere in sight. The talks on services - to free up trade in areas from telecoms to legal work - are a mess. According to the official timetable, all WTO members (except the very poorest) were supposed to have made initial offers two years ago, saying which services they would liberalise. In fact, almost 40 countries - including big emerging economies, such as South Africa, Pakistan and the Philippines - have not done so. Talks on cutting industrial tariffs have also stalled. Brazil and India recently proposed a formula for tariff-cutting that virtually ensured emerging economies would not cut anything.

On farm trade, the situation is even worse. Negotiators have not focused on key questions, such as how to structure tariff cuts or how much to cut subsidies. Instead, they have wasted several months haggling over the technical issue of how to convert tariffs to a common measure. A compromise was scuttled earlier this month after the European Union balked, claiming there had been a “misunderstanding” over what the agreement entailed.

Everybody's at fault

The blame for this sorry state is widely shared. Big emerging countries, such as Brazil and India, are still keener to bemoan rich-world farm subsidies than to open their own economies. China, despite its importance, has shown shamefully little leadership. Too many developing countries refuse to make any concessions on services or industrial tariffs until they see progress in the farm talks. Although once understandable, this strategy now looks like a recipe for overall failure.

But the striking shift in recent months has been the lack of political leadership from the world's trading giants, the EU and America. Washington's ability to lead has been hampered by the lack of a trade representative. That is about to change. Barring last-minute hiccups, the Senate looks set to confirm Rob Portman, Mr Bush's widely-respected nominee, this week.

The EU has not lacked a trade representative, but it may not have the right one. Peter Mandelson, the EU's trade commissioner, raised eyebrows last week with a speech that suggested cotton, an area where the Americans are egregious subsidisers, should be dealt with more quickly than other areas of the farm talks. While his stated aim - to help poor West Africans - was laudable, Mr Mandelson's remarks were guaranteed to infuriate Washington, with whom his relations are already rocky, thanks to a full-blown row this year about the long-running dispute over subsidies to Boeing and Airbus.

Messrs Portman and Mandelson need to start afresh. Rather than sniping at each other, they must work together to get the talks moving, and must cajole others to do the same. If they do, the Doha round still stands a chance of success. If not, the talks will soon end up on the scrap heap of history.

Editorial argues that the global trade talks urgently need some political oomph