“Final Doha Round countdown has begun”

Political leaders want negotiators to deliver them a global trade deal next year and the clock has started ticking on intensified talks, World Trade Organization (WTO) Director General Pascal Lamy said on 30 November.

Lamy said the G20 and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summits in November had signalled they wanted the nine-year-old Doha Round concluded and 2011 was a window of opportunity. “We have the political signal, we have the technical expertise and we have the work programme,” Lamy told a WTO Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC) meeting called to review the state of the Doha talks. “The final countdown starts now.“

The Doha Round, launched in 2001 to open up world trade and help developing countries prosper through increased commerce, has been stalled for two years. But a series of brainstorming contacts among WTO ambassadors in recent months has suggested ways of breaking the deadlock.

In the TNC meeting, Lamy laid out a programme of intensified work for the coming months, starting in December, endorsed by almost all 153 members.

It is unclear whether the leaders of the rich and emerging economies at the G20 summit in Seoul and leaders of Asia-Pacific states at the APEC summit in Yokohama were calling for a deal to be signed and sealed by the end of 2011 or just definitive progress towards an agreement. But most WTO members speaking at the TNC meeting assumed the call was for a done deal, with the possibility of ministers signing it at the WTO’s next conference at the end of 2011.

That would imply negotiators producing revised negotiating texts—the basis for any deal—by the Easter holiday in the core areas of agriculture, industrial goods and services as well as other areas such as rules for unfairly priced imports and fisheries subsidies where negotiations have lagged. It would mean the outlines of an agreement being reached by June or July, to leave the rest of the year for the details to be filled in.

The history of the Doha round is a long litany of missed deadlines, and negotiators are aware that the latest plan could simply erode their credibility still further, with another failure possibly marking the end of the ambitious talks (Reuters, 30.11.10).