DOHA, Qatar – It is amazing that trade negotiators don’t get more things wrong.
Time after time, world trade talks dealing with crucial issues degenerate into a marathon grind of sleep deprivation and compromises made by negotiators too tired to know which end is up.
Is this the only way it can be done?
Consider the scene. Day six of a scheduled five-day trade negotiation had dawned hours before and the World Trade Organization conference hall in Doha was filled with cranky, sleep-deprived negotiators who had been up most of the night.
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It was still far from certain the efforts would pay off in an agreement to launch a new WTO negotiating round. Serious gaps between countries remained.
“I would say it’s no better than 50-50,” said one somber European Union official on the morning of Nov. 14.
Enter the ever-dapper Canadian trade minister Pierre Pettigrew, cheerfully predicting success and looking like he was thriving in the hot house atmosphere.
“I have not seen a trade negotiation that does not finish in the early hours of the morning, that everyone is so exhausted that you drop your guards and you end up finding that we have to become sort of more creative,” he said on his way into another meeting.
For the record, of course, Pettigrew’s optimism was rewarded hours later with an agreement to launch a WTO round.
For anyone watching the process, it is a wonder anything rational was decided.
As negotiators settled in last week for bargaining over a text setting out agenda items for the talks, they spent the first few days agreeing on the easier files, trying to build momentum.
They left the tougher issues – agriculture, trade and the environment, textiles – until the end when fatigue has replaced aggressive self-interest as the reigning mood.
That means the most critical and sensitive issues were decided by men and women perhaps too tired to understand the full ramifications.
In fact, at one media briefing, a Canadian official joked that he was so tired it would take a week for it to sink in what he had agreed to sign. Har har.
An Australian at the talks is credited with defining the three stages of negotiations: propaganda, brinkmanship and exhaustion. All those were on display in Doha.
First came the earnest and sometimes aggressive assertions of the moral, political and theological correctness of national positions. Propaganda, and two days gone.
Then came the insistence that launching a round was important but this country is not budging. Compromise would have to come from elsewhere.
The term “deal breaker” is common during this phase while negotiators, now into days three and four, talk about it being “early days.”
Finally comes day five and round-the-clock horse trading begins, faces get drawn, stares become vacant and hotel room beds go unused. Sometimes it works, as in Doha. Sometimes tired people just get crankier and less flexible, as in Brussels 1990 and Seattle 1999.
But negotiating veterans like Pettigrew seem to think it is the only way. It is amazing negotiators don’t get things wrong.
