April 18, 2007	Wednesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 29, 1428

LAHORE, April 17: Pakistan appears to be quite upbeat about the prospects of the completion of the now stalled Doha Development Round by the end of this year, if not earlier.

“All important world leaders - US President George W. Bush, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Pakistani President Gen Pervez Musharraf, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh – are committed to see the Doha process take final shape as early as possible,” Pakistan’s ambassador to WTO in Geneva Dr Manzoor Ahmed told a press briefing on the conclusion of second day of the 31st Cairns Group Ministerial meeting here on Tuesday.

“I’m quite optimistic about the finalisation of the Doha Development Round this year. Things are moving at a fast pace,” commerce minister Humayun Akhtar Khan told reporters after his meeting with WTO Director General Pascal Lamy on the sidelines of the Cairns Group meeting.

Mr Lamy, however, earlier in his address to the ministerial meeting had linked the conclusion of the Doha round by the end of this year with the renewal of the US Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), which is expiring this July.

“As you know that the ‘window of opportunity’ for the Doha Round is narrowing. While the negotiations can continue after the expiry of the TPA, we all know that – absent substantive progress in the negotiations - that expiry would make it difficult for the US trading partners to reveal their final cards.

It is crucial therefore that the TPA be renewed and that the membership of the WTO capture the existing political momentum for the achievement of full modalities. This would allow for the conclusion of round by the end of 2007,” Mr Lamy said.

The WTO director general warned the meeting: “All of you around the table know exactly what is at stake in the Doha round, and do not need me to remind you of how high the cost of failure would be to everyone, in particular to the world’s poor”.

“In fact, at the last ministerial gathering of the Cairns Group in 2006, I spoke to you about the quantum leap that the Doha round represents relative to previous rounds of negotiations. It is that quantum leap that we would be about to sacrifice, were we to fail this year.”

Mr Lamy stressed in his speech the need to merge bilateral and multilateral talks at a central point, that is, through the Geneva process. He said a focused and centralised approach can help expedite the (Doha round) talks significantly, and if the Cairns Group develops a consensus it can accelerate the process of reaching an agreement at the WTO level.

The Cairns Group is a coalition of 19 developed and developing agriculture exporting countries, which account for 25 per cent of the world’s total agriculture exports.

Dr Manzoor Ahmed said the delegates had re-affirmed their commitment to ensure completion of the ongoing Doha Development Round by the end of this year.

“Even the special delegates from the US, European Union and Japan attending the meeting have stressed the need for completing the Doha round as early as possible,” he said.

He claimed that the delegates from the developed economies had admitted during the meeting that whatever they had offered so far in terms of domestic subsidies and market access to boost international agriculture trade was not enough.

Farmers and governments of the developing economies are demanding that the richer nations should remove all barriers to international agriculture trade by allowing greater market to their products through substantial, across-the-board reductions in tariffs, removal of domestic as well as export subsidies, and expansion of tariff-rate quotas.

Dr Manzoor Ahmad said the TPA needed to be renewed to ensure effective deliberations between the agriculture exporting countries and the United States.