Can Lamy avert another WTO failure?

Date: 08/12/05

When Pascal Lamy took up his post as director-general of the World Trade Organization in September, he did so after a succession of trade negotiation failures.

A combination of violent anti-globalisation riots and political divisions among WTO members, forced trade ministers (and the attendant US President Bill Clinton) to abort the Ministerial Conference in Seattle in 1999. The Doha Ministerial in November 2001 was heading for abject failure, too, but was 'rescued' by the 9/11 terrorist attack which generated the political will to launch a new trade liberalising effort.

That effort all but foundered in Cancún, Mexico, two years later. The US and the EU showed no sign of being able to bridge their differences on agricultural trade.

Developing countries rebelled against a process which they sensed was again pushing their interests to one side. They had signed up to Doha in part because economic development for poor countries was supposed to be its centrepiece. But, they insisted, unless reform of rich countries' agricultural subsidies was forthcoming - the particular focus was subsidies to advanced countries' cotton producers - then there would be no substance behind the "development round" rhetoric.

After Doha, more negotiating deadlines were missed , until a breakthrough in 2004 when, among other things, the EU agreed to drop from the agenda most of the controversial 'Singapore issues' - government procurement and competition policy being the most controversial - the so-called July Framework agreement was reached at the WTO in Geneva. This put a heavy emphasis on agricultural reform as a key to the Doha talks. But since then the talks have stalled and started again with only incremental steps forward. Ambitious agendas have been put on hold and the decision taken to rein in expectations for Hong Kong.

Short analysis of the prospects for the WTO Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong, 13-18 December 2005. Article is part of a European Voice Special Report: 'WTO negotiations'.

• Primary Source

WTO: The WTO: Ministerial Conferences: The Sixth WTO Ministerial Conference, Hong Kong, China, 13-18 December 2005 http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/minist_e/min05_e/min05_e.htm

---