As we enter the festive season of Christmas and the New Year there is little to celebrate coming from the effort to place the development of poor countries as the concern above all others facing the international community. As predicted, the 6th WTO Ministerial Conference just recently concluded in Hong Kong, while not ending in a blowout like Cancun with heated recriminations over who was to blame, as some had feared, it has petered out into a lame declaration to the effect that five years into the Doha Round of negotiations even a little progress is better than none at all. As the Financial Times reported it (paraphrasing Winston Churchill): "rarely in the history of international negotiations have so many laboured for so long to produce so little."
Judging from media reports, by all accounts the negotiations were arduous and exhausting, even for the seasoned veterans who participated. The demonstrations at the conference site grew in intensity and rage as the proceedings dragged along to their inevitable conclusion. For those inside, the fruitlessness of their endeavours grew more and more apparent as time went by. In the end, exhaustion produced its own feelings of exultation that things did not completely fall apart.
For the time being at least, the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, which is aimed at putt-ing development at the centre of the global agenda on trade policy is still alive, if not kicking. Pascal Lamy, the WTO Director-General, was able to claim (somewhat exaggeratedly) that the Doha Round was now 60 per cent on course! This figure was up about 5 to 10 per cent from his assessment a month ago when it was realised that the Doha Round could never be concluded within the time fixed in its original timetable.
Any concrete achievements?
Readers may be wondering at this stage what were the concrete achievements of the conference if any. For one, after intense pressure from the developing countries (and the USA) the European Union (EU) reluctantly agreed to set 2013 as the final date by which it would remove substantially all subsidies paid to its agricultural exporters. This concession to the export competition arrangements of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, however, is hardly worth the paper it is written on, since by the EU's own account its internal reforms timetable for agriculture, known as the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) is due to end these subsidies in any event by 2013. As if in recognition of how token and insubstantial this pledge is in real terms, the EU has also promised to front-load most of the reforms in the period before 2010.
Symbolic and emotional
In symbolic terms, this was, for most delegates, the biggest breakthrough of the conference. As we saw, the reduction of agriculture subsidies by the rich countries has become the most potent cri de coeur in the calls of the poor developing countries for placing development at the centre of global trade policy reform.
If the EU's agricultural subsidies were the biggest symbolic event, the most emotionally unending issue was by far the call of West Africa cotton producers for the USA to end its subsidies programme for its cotton exporters. Again this call was met by a gesture.
The US has promised to enter into direct dialogue with the West African countries concerned, and promised an outcome in which it would guarantee that its cuts in cotton subsidies would exceed, at the minimum, those for all other agricultural produce. The call for the immediate ending of the illegal cotton subsidies programme of the USA and other rich countries was, on paper, therefore heeded.
In addition to these two items, other promises have been elicited from the rich countries for the developing countries. One of these is their support for efforts to build productive (export) capacity to help the poor countries benefit from the opportunities afforded to them as a result of increased market access in the global economy.
The other is the planned introduction of modalities, similar to the EU's Everything but Arms Agreement, in which all of the exports of the least developed countries (LDCs) to the rich countries (except for arms) would be given duty and quota free access to the markets of the rich countries, and some large developing ones like Brazil, China and India.
These were some of the principal achievements of the negotiators, which made up the life-support that has been given to the Doha Round in order to prevent its expiry. In retrospect, it is now certain that if the talks had ended in outright recriminations and condemnations, the WTO endeavour would have been fatally wounded, especially coming after the setbacks at Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003.
The compromise formula reached allows all the parties to the negotiations to seek comfort from the fact that all the hard political choices/decisions had in fact been postponed to an agreed date (March 2006). It is hoped that by then they would have made substantial progress in the overall Doha Round of Development Negotiations.
Reaction
Media reactions and editorial opinion around the world have been similar in tone to this article. Putting a brave face on the outcome, given that the EU had been painted into a corner as the villain of the piece, its Trade Commissioner Peter Mendelson in his press statement after the conference, lamented that the week spent in Hong Kong was "a week of disappointments." He hoped, however, that the outcome would be seen as "no small prize." He then went on to say that while "it is not enough to make the meeting a true success it is enough to save it from failure."
Meanwhile, as the conference wound up the security/police authorities in Hong Kong shifted gear and upped the tempo to a more aggressive containment of public manifestations. Although the demonstrators managed to breach the barricades protecting the negotiators, in the end the conference 'imploded' more than anything else.