India is getting ready for a WTO ministerial meeting in Geneva in May 2008. This has once again raised the hope of a successful resolution of the ongoing Doha Round negotiations. The US, one hears, would like to settle the Doha agenda before the US Presidential elections. This would be good, though India need not show undue haste to cobble together an accord just for the sake of accommodating the US electoral schedule.
The WTO director general Pascal Lamy has suggested that since there is no point in continuing with negotiations as one gets closer to the US polls, they would have to be suspended around the middle of the year. According to him, a ministerial meeting held before the suspension could achieve enough to make it difficult for the next US administration to ignore what has already been negotiated. This makes lot of sense, but the more important point is to truly agree on a number of Doha Round accords (agriculture, non-agriculture market access, services, intellectual property rights and so on) that could then be formalised by the proposed ministerial.
So far, the prospects of a meeting point between developed and developing countries seem to be bleak. According to India?s commerce minister, Kamal Nath, there are around 150 points of discord in the farm negotiations, which must be reduced to not more than 50 before a ministerial could be held.
There are a number of dangers that the Doha Round is facing today. First, it could jeopardise the good work done in the dispute-settlement sphere. Of late, fewer developing countries have had much to complain about.
If the US, EU and Canada won their case against China?s auto part import tariffs, then India and Thailand have also had their stand on US import conditions for shrimp exports upheld.
Second, fatigue could take its toll. The commerce minister has emphasised that the content of any agreement is much more important than meeting schedules. Much is expected of revised agriculture and non-agriculture market access (Nama) drafts, which were circulated in February 2008, as also of services negotiations that have finally got underway.
But ground realities indicate many hurdles, unless India is willing to settle for a hastily arranged patch-up that would let schedules override our trade interests.
In June 2007, when the G-4 Potsdam negotiations among the US, EU, India and Brazil collapsed, the Round was thought to be as good as dead. Our commerce minister even said that developed countries were looking ?at promoting and protecting the prosperity of their farmers? while India?s effort was to protect ?the livelihood of our farmers?.
That talks are still on is a reassuring sign. On farms, the US trade representative, Susan Schwab, has said that ?a significant number of the 40-odd outstanding issues? in the farm talks need to be settled before ministers join the negotiations. This could be difficult. Talks on Nama, as the commerce minister sees it, have been plagued by the fact that the last draft text represented the views of ?only one set of advanced countries while almost completely cold-shouldering the views of more than a 100 developing countries?.
The outlook for the Doha Round is bleak, and it?s unclear whether the new drafts can change that. Then, spoilers could also come from issues related to services, rules, trade-related intellectual property rights, and so on?not because of an intrinsic inability to resolve differences, but because there is just not enough time to discuss in depth the problematic issues, without which a truly useful Doha Round for the poor world would not be possible. That would be a pity. Trade deserves to assure everyone a fair deal.
The author is trade professor at Icfai Business School, Chandigarh.
E-mail: vasu022@gmail.com