After two days of intense deliberations between 36 trade ministers, India on Friday announced a much-awaited breakthrough on the deadlocked Doha Development Round negotiations of the World Trade Organisation. Trade diplomats will meet in Geneva in ten days to thrash out a future course of action. The Doha Round talks aim to liberalise world trade by bringing down tariffs and barriers across the globe.
?We have reached an agreement to intensify negotiations. There has been a breakthrough. The impasse in restoring the negotiations has been broken,? said commerce minister Anand Sharma, who chaired the meet attended by representatives from the US, European Commission, Brazil and China, among others.
India earned brownie points by hosting the summit and managing to convince the WTO members to re-engage in negotiations. The Doha talks have been in a state of suspended animation after a similar meeting of trade ministers ended inconclusively in July 2008 over differences on measures to enable developing and poor countries counter a surge in farm imports.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh applauded the global trade ministers for the breakthrough. ?This will uplift the animal spirit of economic agents all over the world.? He made the comments when the ministers called on him at his residence.
?Ministers acknowledged that the unambiguous political signals emanating from earlier meetings had not been translated into action in Geneva. They were conscious that mere reaffirmation of commitment was not enough unless this was converted into effective instructions to negotiators to re-engage, with a view to concluding the Round successfully within 2010,? stated a end-of-summit summary released by Sharma.
?The ministers have agreed to review the progress made by officials and do all that is possible to adhere the timeline of completing the Doha Round by 2010,? Sharma added.
Diplomats said the formal ministerial meeting under the auspices of WTO in Geneva scheduled for the last week of November could see this review take place. ?The senior officials? meeting will decide whether to have a separate ministerial to review the progress of the talks or do it at the scheduled meeting itself,? said a government official.
?To be very frank, we haven?t had an active week of negotiations (since July 2008). What we got from these meetings is that it is the time to go for re-engagement,? said WTO director-general Pascal Lamy at a meeting organised by CII.
He also acknowledged that the negotiations in Geneva would not be easy. ?There remain tough nuts to crack in these negotiations and we shouldn?t underestimate this,? he added. According to him, the Doha Round talks are more complex than the previous Uruguay Round as topics have increased threefold, while the number of members has increased five times.
Though there were a limited number of invitees, the delegates represented the interests of around 100 WTO members. Participants aired their views on restarting the Doha negotiations, but no specific issues related to the multilateral trade deal were discussed. The points of contention–according to Lamy, they constitute only a fifth of the topics–will now be thrashed out in Geneva.