WTO chief calls for breaking deadlock: Doha round talks
GENEVA, May 1: WTO chief Pascal Lamy on Monday appealed to trading nations to do their utmost to break a logjam in talks on liberalising global commerce, saying they must bounce back after missing a key deadline.
“I do not believe that we have lost the opportunity to produce positive results, but we really have no more time to spare,” Lamy told a session of the 149-nation WTO’s top negotiating forum.
Trade diplomats and a handful of ministers who are key players in the WTO’s Doha Round are gathering in Geneva this week to take stock of the sluggish pace in the negotiations on tearing down barriers to commerce.
The talks have been held up by persistent disputes, as developing countries demand greater access for their agricultural produce on wealthy markets and rich nations in turn press for more opportunities to trade industrial goods and services.
The Doha Round has stumbled repeatedly since it was launched in 2001 with the goal of using trade to improve the economic lot of poor countries.
On April 30, WTO governments missed their target for a deal on a key plank of the talks: the mathematical formulas for reducing customs duties, subsidies and other hurdles to trade.
Lamy said that negotiators could still maintain momentum in the round provided they made more efforts to settle their differences.
“We have had a disappointment which we have to acknowledge, but not a disaster, and we have already moved to convert disappointment into determination,” he said.
“There is little doubt in my mind that the coming weeks will place significant strain on all of us.”
“What is imperative now is to make significant progress on key issues as quickly as possible, so that we can reach agreement on modalities in agriculture and NAMA rapidly, being clear in our minds that it is now a question of weeks rather than months,” he said.
In WTO jargon, “modalities” is the term for the formulas, while “NAMA” refers to trade in industrial goods.
The April deadline had been part of a package set at a WTO conference in Hong Kong last December, in a drive to complete the Doha Round by the end of 2006.
On July 31, negotiators face another target — by then, they aim to agree on so-called “schedules,” which would set out how countries would implement the trade treaty that would mark the end of the round.—AFP
