Doha talks on knife’s edge at Swiss ministerial meeting

By Stewart Fleming

Date: 06/10/05

Trade ministers from the leading industrial and emerging market countries will hold a series of meetings in Zurich early next week in a bid to keep the Doha Round of trade liberalisation negotiations from grinding to a halt.

"Next week's meetings are absolutely critical to keeping Doha on the road," said Bernhard Speyer, a senior economist and trade policy expert at Deutsche Bank Research in Frankfurt.

Officials are aiming to prepare a detailed paper for a meeting of trade ministers from the 148-strong members of the World Trade Organization on 13-18 December in Hong Kong.

They say that unless negotiations before then have succeeded in reaching broad compromises on key outstanding issues, the vital Hong Kong meeting will not achieve the breakthrough necessary to bring the round to a successful conclusion next year.

Trade officials say that the current negotiations are now so delicately poised that it is not certain that a preparatory meeting of ministers scheduled for 11-13 November in Seoul, South Korea, will take place. Negotiators are aware that unless major issues have been resolved by the end of November, there is little hope of a successful meeting in Hong Kong.

"We need to have a pretty precise paper by the end of next month. It is too late to start having substantive negotiations when we get to Hong Kong," one trade official said this week.

Next week's level talks in Zurich will be attended by Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson. On Tuesday morning (11 October), there will be a ministerial level meeting of the Group of 20 leading trading nations, and then in the afternoon the trade ministers from the so-called Five Interested Parties (FIPS), Australia, the US, the EU, Brazil, and India will try to move the negotiations forward.

On Wednesday ministers from the FIPS Plus group, which includes other powerful trading nations such as Japan, China, Switzerland and Malaysia, will meet.

"Pascal Lamy [director-general of the WTO] in his recent statements, has been more and more explicit about the risk that the negotiations will run into the ground," said one trade expert. "Some of his comments have bordered on the alarmist," he added.

With the critical date for keeping the Doha Round only ten weeks away, he said that the major players in the talks were not fully engaged.

America's ability to make the necessary compromises had been weakened with President George W. Bush distracted by issues such as the Iraq war, the hurricane disasters and his own fading political clout in the Congress, he said.

The EU's position was also weaker, he said, because Germany lacked an effective government and the French government was not strong enough to make politically painful decisions needed to narrow differences in the negotiations.

Article anticipates a series of meetings in Zurich, 11-12 October 2005, bringing together Trade Ministers from the leading industrial and emerging market countries in a bid to keep the Doha Round of trade liberalisation negotiations from failing.