WTO talks fail on farm stand

NEW DELHI: Tussle over farm trade has tripped development out of global trade liberalisation talks. World Trade Organisation (WTO) director general Pascal Lamy suspended the on-going multilateral trade negotiations on Monday after the ministerial meet of the six key member countries, including India, failed to produce results.

While there is uncertainty about when the talks would resume, it is now established that the ambitious attempts being made by the DG to conclude the Doha round of negotiations by the year-end has come to a naught.

Trade ministers from Brazil, India, the EU, the US, Australia and Japan (G-6 countries) had converged in Geneva to push forward the talks for liberalising trade in agriculture and industrial goods which reached a stalemate earlier this month.

Speaking to ET, officials said views on agriculture liberalisation held by the six members were so far apart that there was no scope to discuss industrial goods. “With the US refusing to make further commitments in bringing down domestic agriculture subsidies, there was no opportunity to discuss other things at length,” sources said.

With nothing seeming to be working, the DG thought it best to suspend negotiations and let members reflected on the work that has been done. Mr Lamy said that for the talks to move, the US must impose higher cuts on farm subsidies, the EU should reduce its tariffs on farm imports while India and Brazil should bring down customs duties on industrial goods.

Commerce minister Kamal Nath, in a statement at the WTO’s trade negotiations committee, said that some developed countries were attempting to convert this round into a market access round for their products into developing country markets, thereby inverting the core development dimension.

This was not acceptable. While the collapse of talks is a set-back to the Doha round, it certainly does not spell the death-knell of the negotiations. The Doha round is only in its fifth year whereas the preceding Uruguay Round went on for more than eight years. Interestingly, the Uruguay Round, too, had broken down in its fifth year way back in 1990.

This led to Arthur Dunkel heading the GATT (later renamed WTO) taking on the reins and producing the now famous ‘Dunkel draft’ which led to the agreement.

Mr Nath added that the Doha Round was about opening new markets for developing countries especially in developed countries and about creating new opportunities and economic growth for them in all sectors including industries and services. This is what we have failed to do so far in these negotiations, he said.