While World Trade Organization enthusiasts including director general Pascal Lamy insist a deal was close in Geneva at the end of July, the chair of the agricultural negotiations has offered a more pessimistic assessment.
In an August review of the final pressure-packed days of negotiation before Lamy admitted to temporary defeat July 29, New Zealand WTO ambassador Crawford Falconer said there remained significant disagreement on many points and many contentious issues were not even yet on the table.
“As a matter of plain fact, there was decisive disagreement on certain matters while other very significant issues were not even dealt with,” he wrote in a report for the WTO trade negotiations committee. “So there was no possibility to put a judgment on the ‘other’ matters to a final test.”
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His assessment is in contrast to Lamy’s insistence that the breakdown came because of a disagreement over how developing countries could use a special safeguard mechanism to protect their farmers from import surges. This implied other issues could have been resolved.
Falconer noted that the issues were debated within a select group of seven countries invited by Lamy to try to hammer out a deal. The other 145 WTO countries, including Canada, were not part of those negotiations and on many of the “agreed upon” issues would have had serious objections.
He also noted that the consensus that emerged on many issues within that group of seven countries happened only because they thought a deal was possible. Outside that pressure cooker, those compromises may no longer apply.
“That situation was one where at the time, members were conscious that there was a genuine endgame scenario,” Falconer wrote. “Members were, accordingly, prepared to accept compromises that were not generally their preferred options. That was a mind-set that applied as of yesterday. As of today, that remains, at best, moot.”
Members have moved on from that endgame pressure, said Falconer.
The possibility of an imminent return to discussions over detailed texts to complete the round this year is past, he said.
“That is because those texts only had a rationale for their existence in circumstances where members were in genuine final decision-making mode, as they were at that time,” said Falconer. “Regrettably, time has moved on.”
On two parts of the emerging text that were of particular interest to Canada, the agriculture negotiation chair had some interesting assessments.
He said the seven countries were agreed that developed countries would have had to accept increased import competition for their sensitive sectors such as Canada’s supply management.
“There remained some members outside the G7 process for whom such an approach would have required at least some further discussion.”
For Canada, that clearly was the case with conflicting industry sectors pressuring the government to go in opposite directions on the issue and the government insisting no compromise was acceptable.
But on the last-minute consensus that state trading enterprises (STE) such as the Canadian Wheat Board should lose their export monopoly by 2013, Falconer thought there was general agreement even though Canada and New Zealand, both outside the select group, insisted this was a domestic issue not to be dictated by the WTO.
“On export competition, I believe that there was a specific and balanced outcome on the outstanding elements on food aid, export credits, STEs and phase-out of export subsidies that was ripe and ready to go,” Falconer wrote.
