Satoko Adachi – Geneva
Negotiators of the World Trade Organization who were holding talks in Geneva have failed to strike a deal to submit to the ministerial meeting the following week, WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo told the body’s general council on Tuesday, November 26.
“The reality is that we have proved that we can’t cross the final yard here in Geneva,” Azevedo told reporters after the council meeting. “The process here is over.”
Azevedo has pushed diplomats from the 159 member countries for weeks to try to agree on a text for the ministers to rubber-stamp in December in Bali, Indonesia. Bali has been seen as perhaps the last chance to revive the WTO’s Doha round of talks, launched in 2001 at a summit in Qatar but repeatedly failed to produce an agreement.
But the failure to draw up even lower-level thematic accords before the summit indicates the organization is facing the worst situation since its establishment in 1995 in terms of proving its raison d’etre as a framework to facilitate global trade liberalization.
In the council meeting, Azevedo said that he will not take the set of 10 negotiated texts on agriculture, trade facilitation and development as finalized documents which the ministers can announce as agreed outcomes at their Bali meeting scheduled on December 3 to 6.
“I will inform the ministers that we have failed to find convergence,” Azevedo said, adding that he will “simply use (the documents) to brief ministers on the state of play as of now – but not as agreed texts for adoption.”
As for future prospects, Azevedo went only as far as saying: “Ministers will need to decide what future they want to see – both for the issues on the table here today – and for the WTO.”
Azevedo said that the negotiations have stalled near the end, as some member countries retracted their offer and took a hard-line stance, adding that the final few steps could not be taken on the negotiators’ level.
“This is not about developed versus developing countries,” he said. “This is also not about lack of time.” “If we are to get this deal over the line it will need political engagement and political will,” he said, indicating the possibility that the member countries would seek for agreement on a ministerial level.
If the member countries fail to reach any agreement, the rule to refrain from bringing trade disputes until 2017 on developing countries’ agricultural subsidies to build public food stockpiles, which was basically agreed on by negotiators, could lose effect and developing countries such as India would be sued under the WTO.
Some are proposing continuing negotiations until next spring or the end of July. Such suggestions would have sounded realistic 10 years ago, when the WTO ministerial meeting in Cankun, Mexico, failed to reach agreement. But not now, as the United States is eagerly working on creating a new global trade system under such free trade negotiations as the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership talks with the European Union.
While some talk about possible progress which could be made through ministers’ political decisions, many share the opinion that such political bargaining cannot be made at a meeting where ministers of 159 countries gather, and that the discussions on the future prospects of the Doha round would be even less likely.
(Nov. 28, 2013)