Are WTO talks nearing their final gasp or is there yet hope for a deal?
Western Producer reporter Barry Wilson travelled to Geneva recently to see what key players are saying.
GENEVA – The World Trade Organization’s director general concedes there is no guarantee his frantic attempt to forge a trade deal by the end of July will succeed.
However, Pascal Lamy says he does not like to talk about the alternative.
“I don’t talk a lot about this because I’m working on Plan A,” he said in an interview last week.
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But then he relented. Failure would be an economic setback and a point of tension between developed and developing nations.
“If the negotiation was to break, what is on the table would disappear and there’s a lot on the table,” he said.
“And in geo-political terms, it would be a real setback because it would be seen as rich northern countries resisting an adjustment of the rules, which we inherited from 20 years ago from another world, which is not the world of today.”
Lamy has been the WTO’s top bureaucrat for four years and before that was a key European Union player in trade negotiations.
He said negotiations have been complicated by changes in public opinion and priorities since they were launched in November 2001 in Doha, Qatar, in the aftermath of the suicide attacks on key U.S. sites including the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
Gathered in a heavily guarded conference hall in a small Middle East country across the Persian Gulf from Afghanistan, home base for the Al-Qaeda suicide attack planners, delegates to the WTO conference were determined to launch a new world trade negotiation as a statement that international institutions would survive terrorist attacks.
Since then, however, issues such as global warming, financial instability and changing alliances have complicated the WTO dynamic.
Lamy said the impact of globalization is a complicating factor that has made a deal more difficult.
“The fear, the political anxieties on globalization have increased,” he said.
“Social and economic fabrics have been more impacted than in the past and the capacity of domestic systems to cope with that is lagging behind. This has created a sort of backlash which makes the politics of trade more complex than they were 10 years ago.”
However, Lamy said the evidence of the damage from protectionism in past years also motivates WTO members to try to find a way to manage the forces of globalization through new agreements.
“They know that the cost of this would be terrible, much higher than in the past,” he said.
“I see the necessity of governing this globalization, harnessing it, managing it, finding the right compromises between new players, new forces, so that the scene becomes more stable rather than more dangerous.”
