A senior federal trade department official last week cautioned against overstating the consequences of a failure to reach a World Trade Organization deal by the end of July.
Bruce Christie, director of multilateral trade policy at the foreign affairs and international trade department, told MPs that failure to reach a WTO deal this year does not necessarily mean the Doha Round is dead.
“I don’t think if we miss the deadline in 2006, the sky will fall,” he said during a May 10 meeting of the House of Commons international trade committee.
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It could mean the delay of a few years while the United States Congress renews its “fast track” trade negotiating legislation due to expire in summer 2007, he added.
“But the process will continue.”
Conventional wisdom among key WTO countries and WTO leaders is that without agreement on the outline of a deal in Geneva by the end of July, negotiations could collapse because time would run out to get a trade treaty through the U.S. Congress before the fast-track negotiating authority expires.
The spectre of failure, combined with predictions of increasing subsidies and protectionism and possibly the demise of the WTO itself, is used in the Geneva negotiating process as a way to keep pressure on negotiators to make progress.
Those concerns were reflected in a question Liberal Mark Eyking put to Christie.
What progress is being made and what are the prospects for a deal after earlier missed deadlines? he wondered. “This month is very important.”
Christie said looming deadlines and predictions of failure are nothing new for the WTO.
“We are where we always seem to be, in a state of crisis.”
Eyking said the lack of agreement to reduce trade and production-distorting subsidies would mean “we will have low commodity prices for a long, long time.”
Christie responded that while Canada has many objectives at the WTO talks, market access issues are key for the Canadian government. However, eliminating “massive subsidies” in competitor countries is also a main Canadian objective.
