Mandelson eyes Doha restart after US elections

Peter Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, says that in the wake of the US mid-term elections he sees a chance of restarting stalled negotiations on a new global trade round.

Speaking to European Voice on Tuesday (14 November), Mandelson said: "Post the Congressional elections we have an opportunity which didn’t exist during the campaign."

The issues had been "too partisan, too hotly contested" in the run-up to the elections, he said. Asked about fears that the new intake of Democrats would be more opposed to free trade, he said that the "tensions [over trade issues] had not completely disappeared".

Mandelson said that there could soon be positive developments emerging from World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiators in Geneva. "The Geneva machine is picking up and is becoming more active. You’ll see that in the coming days."

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy has called an informal meeting of ambassadors in Geneva this morning (16 November) to discuss the state of the Doha Development Round negotiations. This follows a meeting of WTO agricultural trade negotiators last week and meetings of other groups dealing with market access for agricultural products.

International trade officials said that the WTO "was starting to turn on the engine" in case there was a new political impetus from national capitals to relaunch negotiations on the Doha round.

Mandelson said the Geneva negotiating machine would start operating in a way it had not done since the suspension of talks in July. He said he hoped that the renewed activity would lead to "political level negotiations".

Lamy suspended the negotiations in July when they were deadlocked in the run-up to the US Congressional elections. But he said at the time that there could be a window of opportunity to relaunch negotiations after the November elections until March. US President George W. Bush’s authority to sign trade deals without their being challenged by Congress expires in July. After that, unless the Trade Promotion Authority is renewed the US will be hamstrung in negotiations.

Mandelson also responded positively to comments by German Chancellor Angela Merkel about pursuing greater regulatory convergence with the US rather than pushing for a Transatlantic Free Trade Area which some German politicians have been advocating. He said that her calls for the EU and US to work together on intellectual property protection, hedge fund regulation and rules for greater transparency for stock exchanges went "in the right direction".

The commissioner said that Merkel’s views on an EU-US trade agreement had been "misrepresented". She was talking about the need to break down regulatory barriers rather than reducing tariffs, he said. "She’s identified the right issues," he added. While these subjects were already being discussed as part of the Transatlantic Economic Initiative launched last year, they were hard to bring to a successful conclusion, he said, because the EU and US had long-standing regulatory structures and both sides thought their approach was best. He said the best potential for the initiative was in agreeing a common approach to future regulation.

Mandelson confirmed that in the coming weeks (6 December) he would be seeking mandates to negotiate free trade agreements with South Korea, India and the ten members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) which include Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand.

Looking ahead to next week’s (24 November) summit with Russia, Mandelson said that there was "interest from both sides" in agreeing a wide range of trade and investment rules. But he said that reaching an agreement would be slow and difficult.

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Peter Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, says that in the wake of the US mid-term elections he sees a chance of restarting stalled negotiations on a new global trade round.