India, US to meet in Geneva to revive Doha Round talks

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New Delhi, Sep 4: India and the US, alongwith other countries will gather at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva next week in an attempt to restart the Doha development Round talks that had collapsed in July-end.

During the recent visit of WTO director general Pascal Lamy here, India had indicated its willingness to return to the negotiating table and revive the seven-year-old Doha Round talks. The talks, aimed at clinching a global trade deal, had failed late last month mainly due to differences between India and the US over safeguards to protect poor farmers in developing countries from import surges of agricultural products.

India had said that it would give another shot at taking forward the talks next month if the US gives positive signals.

Both India and US has not given any indications regarding their change in respective stance. When asked if there was any revival of WTO talks, commerce and industry minister Kamal Nath told reporters on the sidelines of a conference here that “next Tuesday, there will be a technical group meeting on agriculture at WTO in Geneva.” However, the minister said he would not be going to Geneva for WTO talks.

News agency Reuters quoted US Trade Representative Susan Schwab as saying Thursday that multiple meetings will be held in Geneva next week. However, Reuters quoted Schwab as saying “Our approach to this hasn’t changed ... We want to see the Doha round succeed. We want to see it move forward.” Next week’s talks will take be held at the senior officials level, rather than the topmost political level of trade ministers, Schwab said.

Significantly, she said it was unrealistic to believe that a July 25 package crafted by Lamy and supported by the United States could be the basis for resumed negotiations. “We can’t pretend to ourselves that, ‘poof,’ you can recreate July 25. You can’t do that. But let’s capture the progress we made and do our best to prevent the erosion,” Schwab said.

After requesting India to return to talks in Geneva, Lamy had gone to the US to get them to do the same. Some US officials, however, had hinted that it was meaningless to bring back the WTO Member countries to the negotiating table as the unresolved issues were highly complicated in nature to be settled so soon.