World Trade Organization negotiators have agreed to make a concerted effort in early 2011 to develop by March an outline of what a global agricultural deal would look like.
And by agreeing to use the last proposed text from 2008 as the starting point, it means that reducing supply management protections against imports and eliminating state trading enterprise monopolies like the Canadian Wheat Board single desk will be on the table and supported by most countries other than Canada.
Canadian negotiators are under instruction from Ottawa to resist both proposals, although trade analysts generally believe that Canada would not walk away from a broad agreement even if it loses on those two points.
However, since WTO requires unanimous agreement from its 153 members, Canada has some bargaining leverage.
According to the schedule agreed to last week at a meeting of the agriculture negotiating committee in Geneva, a “near-final draft” of an agricultural deal would be completed by the end of March and final details nailed down by summer.
It would then require a ministerial meeting to ratify the “modalities” agreement of general rules, assuming non-agricultural negotiations follow the same timetable, and give negotiators the rest of the year to pin down the details of a final deal including concessions and tariff commitments by each country.
During the nine years since it was launched at Doha, Qatar, in 2001 with a three-year timetable, politicians and WTO director general Pascal Lamy often have proclaimed that progress and a deal were imminent. All deadlines have been missed and critics have suggested that the Doha Round, with its mandate based in the traumas of post-Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States, is in danger of becoming irrelevant.
