With nine days to go before a key meeting of WTO ministers, US, European and developing country officials are warning that lingering conflicts could again scuttle attempts to lower global trade barriers.
Ministers from the 142-member World Trade Organization are to meet in the Qatari capital Doha November 9-13 to debate an agenda for a new round of multilateral trade liberalization talks.
Looming over the gathering are bitter memories of a similar bid by the WTO in Seattle two years ago that collapsed in abject failure, a debacle encouraged by the presence in the west coast US city of some 40,000 anti-globalization demonstrators. But the Seattle talks were also doomed by sharp internal differences over such questions as agricultural export subsidies and access for developing country exports to markets in the industrialized world.
By most accounts those gaps remain and now appear to threaten the outcome of the Doha meeting. "I think we're heading for a new Seattle," warned a developing country official Wednesday in Geneva, as WTO delegates met to debate a draft text to be presented to the full ministerial session.
In a written statement the Nigerian delegation charged that the text under discussion was "unsatisfactory because it is one-sided," accommodating "in total" the interests of rich countries and disregarding those of developing and least developed nations.
"Time changes everything and the road between Seattle and Doha appears long. But the problems remain the same," the statement said. Developing nations, insisting they have yet to taste the fruits of previous trade liberalization, are pressing for greater access to Western markets, more flexibility under WTO rules to provide generic medicines to their people and assurances they will be included in all aspects of Doha decision making.
In Washington US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick earlier this week predicted rough sledding for trade ministers trying to agree on an agenda in Doha, adding ominously: "I do not know if we will succeed."
If the WTO meeting ends inconclusively, he said, Washington would go it alone in trade matters -- notably through regional and bilateral trade pacts. But Zoellick's remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations, a research institute, were most striking for their harshness toward Japan ahead of the Doha meeting.
"So far, while I have been willing to discuss the anti-dumping and countervailing duty issues in a way that tries to work out something, the Japanese have just said no to everything in the process," Zoellick said. "That won't work," he added.
"It is frankly a disappointment for a country that was able to grow and develop through international trade and whose future depends on international trade to be acting in my view in such a narrow-minded fashion."
The United States and Japan have long been at odds over Washington's practice of applying anti-dumping duties on imports it says have entered the country at unfairly low prices as well as countervailing duties on exports it says are subsidized by foreign governments.
Japan has denounced such duties, notably as they have applied to its steel exports, charging that they amount to a bid by the United States to shield its troubled domestic steel industry from foreign competition. Zoellick also alluded to agriculture, raising the specter of another clash with the European Union over subsidies offered by EU governments to boost agricultural exports. That dispute was a major contributor to the breakdown in Seattle.
While Washington contends that export subsidies distort trade and is pressing for their eventual abolition, the EU maintains they are necessary to preserve the economies and culture of rural communities in Europe. EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy of France on Wednesday added his voice to the rising chorus of pre-Doha discontent, citing agriculture in particular.
"There is a rough draft on the table," he told a meeting at the French parliament. "There remain serious problems to resolve in at least three areas -- the environment, social issues and agriculture." But Lamy nonetheless maintained that prospects for success are brighter ahead of Doha than they were in the days leading up to Seattle, citing the transparency of pre-meeting contacts and a greater openness to developing country needs. — (AFP, Paris)
by Nathaniel Harrison
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
