Editorial: Nervous march to trade talks

These are nervous days for everyone who understands the word Doha. It is more than the name of a city in the Arabian emirate of Qatar where the World Trade Organisation launched its latest round of global negotiations four years ago. The Doha round aims to vastly widen the benefits of lower tariffs, less dumping of subsidised products and fairer trade rules.

The round was to have started a year earlier at Seattle where the launch failed spectacularly. There were two battles at Seattle - one on the streets fought by the "anti-globalisation" movement in rich nations at that time, and one inside the conference, fought by a bloc of poor or less developed nations newly admitted to the WTO. The forces on the streets aimed to stop the conference. They failed. The forces inside aimed to ensure a round would not get under way unless it addressed the needs of developing nations. They succeeded.

When the representatives of the 148 member states reconvened in the quieter environs of the Gulf the round they managed to launch was entitled the Doha Development Agenda.

Since then its progress has been as difficult as its beginning. A scheduled mid-point meeting at Cancun, Mexico, in 2003 was another failure. Again, the developing nations let the talks collapse rather than accept anti-corruption and other "governance" resolutions in return for some promising noises from the European Union and the United States on the central issues of agricultural trade. Again the perseverance of the poor paid off. The following year a meeting at Geneva accepted the kind of concessions from rich countries that were on offer at Cancun while asking less of the developing countries than was asked there.

The "framework agreement" aimed to negotiate the elimination of subsidised agricultural exports, improve market access for farm products by reducing tariffs and expanding quotas, reduce trade-distorting agricultural supports, improve market access for manufactured goods through reductions in tariff and non-tariff barriers, simplify the red tape on cross-border movements of goods and open markets to global services. That was just 15 months ago, but again the talks are in peril.

A summit meeting in Hong Kong scheduled just six weeks away may be cancelled unless the European Union soon offers concessions on food tariffs. A group of 20 agricultural nations have called for average cuts of 54 per cent. The United States has proposed a 75 per cent cut, the EU just a 25 per cent reduction.

Three months ago when trade ministers failed to agree on an outline declaration for Hong Kong, big business lobbies in the United States, Europe, Japan and other places joined forces to press Governments for "politically painful decisions".

Over the past fortnight groups of trade ministers have been meeting in Geneva and Brussels to try to make progress on the agricultural issues.

The United States has offered significant cuts in its farm subsidies but the EU has not made an adequate response. Nor has the EU yet lived up to its promises on market access, which is probably more important to developing countries. The World Bank president, Paul Wolfowitz, has called for more subsidy cuts by the US, more market opening concessions by the Europeans and less protection by the developing nations. But he is crying into the wind in Europe, where the French and the new German Government seem to be on a protectionist bent.

At this rate Hong Kong will fail in the manner of Seattle and Cancun. And as happened after those meetings, it might shock or shame member states into an agreement some time later. We may be nervously waiting this time next year for Doha to bear fruit.