WASHINGTON - A "mini-ministerial" meeting has been convened by the World Trade
Organization (WTO) in Delhi to help member countries draft a roadmap to
conclude the troubled Doha round of trade talks and set the stage for the Group
of 20 (G-20) later this month and the WTO ministerial gathering in Geneva in
November.
The two-day mini-ministerial session in Delhi, concluding this Friday, and the
upcoming G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, present a dual challenge for the Barack
Obama administration.
The White House must present a trade agenda that will help conclude the
grueling Doha round of trade negotiations, which have gone on for eight years,
while devising concrete trade agreements and policies to assist in the recovery
from the global
financial crisis and appease domestic interest groups.
WTO director general Pascal Lamy has stated that he would like to see the Doha
round serve as more than a stock-taking exercise, but the recent financial
crisis and the continued deadlock on agricultural subsidies in Europe and the
US and intellectual property agreements continue to be major roadblocks for
concluding the round with a substantive set of trade agreements.
Lamy has expressed hope that the Delhi meeting will provide an opportunity for
ministers to begin mapping out a conclusion to the Doha round.
"I think this ministerial ... can be a very important step for our goal for the
successful completion of the Doha round of negotiations," US Trade
Representative Ron Kirk told reporters on Tuesday.
The Obama administration has not yet fully defined what its trade agenda or
proposed policies might look like, but this month will likely bring greater
clarification following the mini-ministerial in Delhi and the higher-profile
G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh later in the month.
The Doha round began in 2001 with the intention of removing trade barriers in
both the developed and developing world, but recent ministerials - most
recently in Geneva in 2008 - have ended in deadlocks as the European Union and
US have found it politically difficult to cut agricultural subsidies.
Developing countries have expressed concern with Trade-Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which force developing countries to honor
the patents of pharmaceutical manufacturers and abstain from domestically
producing generic drugs - widely seen as a trade-off between intellectual
property rights or public health.
The US is perceived as one of the biggest proponents of intellectual property
agreements and has worked through multilateral and bilateral relationships to
seek their enforcement.
"The US is accused of granting patents on dubious grounds and then trying to
enforce them through the bilateral free trade agreements and investment
treaties," senior policy analyst Steve Suppan at the US-based Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy told Inter Press Service.
Obama has called for a successful conclusion to the Doha talks, but his
administration will face the difficult task of contributing to the Doha round
negotiation without offending industry groups in the US which will likely ask
for greater protectionism.
The administration's situation is further hampered by the fact that industry
groups and trade unions have a long history with the Democrats and hold
considerable influence.
"I do think the president will have more to say about the role trade will play
in our overall economic recovery sometime between now and the G-20 summit,"
Kirk told reporters. "I think what may make this different is that with the
change in the administration - in the United States and in India certainly, in
South Africa, in other countries - you have a new cast of countries with new
leadership that have a desire to try to make this happen."
The financial crisis was heavy over the mini-ministerial, where many have
expressed concern that the WTO may have failed to encourage appropriate
regulatory measures in the financial markets.
"When you allow [the financial system's] governance to deteriorate, when you
have banks that are too big to fail, it means that you've abandoned regulatory
supervision and you've also abandoned your antitrust enforcement. That's
something the Obama administration is looking pretty closely at," said Suppan.
"The value of the WTO at this point is a venue where members can air their
differences and explain what they're doing domestically, but if the WTO is a
negotiating machine where the terms of the negotiation aren't working, then
your ability to change course is very, very limited," he said.
Food policy is another hot-button issue and a group of 125 non-governmental
organizations from 50 countries called on the governments participating in the
trade talks in India to reject the further liberalization of food markets and
promote policies that will achieve food security and rural development and
safeguard farmers' livelihoods.
The organizations, of which 13 are in Africa, argue in a letter to the 36
countries attending the mini-ministerial meeting that WTO policies have
resulted in "a failed global agricultural system including extremely volatile
commodities markets, a lack of global access to nutritious and affordable food,
an increase in hunger, and the erosion of farmers' incomes."
WTO trade agreements require unanimous approval from member countries, which
has added to the difficulty in furthering multilateral trade agreements.
But during the Doha round, bilateral and regional trade agreements have
flourished, going from 49 agreements at the beginning of the round to 167 as of
last month.
This relatively new trend has been seen by some analysts as an expansion of
trade agreements and trade-enabling frameworks in the absence of substantive
progress by the WTO at the multilateral level.
Others see the growing number of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements as
prohibitive to the progress of multilateral diplomacy and helping to create a
"spaghetti bowl" of trade agreements which make prospects for successful WTO
trade agreements increasingly unlikely.
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