DEVELOPED countries at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, remain hopeful of the Doha Round of global negotiations and are keen on completing them, despite the feeling of some quarters they have become a lost cause.

Launched in 2001, the Doha Round involves all 153 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiating among themselves to lower trade barriers and revise trade rules on 20 areas. But the talks have been stymied by contentious issues of agriculture, services, intellectual property and the global financial crisis in 2008.

Agriculture remained a caontentious issue for developing countries like the Philippines, particularly the matter of designating safeguards for imported farm products such as the designation of special products and the inclusion of special safeguard mechanisms (SSM).

In the Hong Kong draft text issued in December 2005, developing countries were originally allowed to designate a specific number of agricultural products as SP, which would not suffer tariff cuts. Under the SSM, developing countries were allowed to use the price and volume-based trigger mechanisms as basis for adjusting tariffs upward should there be an influx of imported farm products.

Subsequent amendments to the text, however, sought to reduce the number of farm products that could use  the trade remedies.

“Doha is not dead,” Craig Emerson, minister of trade of Australia, told
participants at the WEF annual meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. “I think there’s enough life in the Doha Round to persist with it.”

But WTO Director General Pascal Lamy said a lot of political will was needed to push the negotiations forward. He said the difficulty of pushing for a multilateral negotiation on trade has made government leaders shift their focus on bilateral talks and regional arrangements.

These arrangements now include the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The countries included in the TPP are Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the United States.

The WEF, said Lamy, is concerned with different, and perhaps contradictory, industry standards and regulatory regimes that parties in various bilateral and multilateral agreements may commit themselves to. This will pose new barriers to multinationals and global supply chains, which are becoming more extensive by the day, he said.

At the WEF annual meeting, US Trade Representative Ron Kirk said the US has not given up on the Doha Round but acknowledged it is easier to negotiate bilateral agreements, which can create more jobs and bring benefits to two parties.

But Gita Wirjawan, Indonesian trade minister, said the Doha Round was still needed because it remains the best way for every nation, especially developing countries like Indonesia, to be treated fairly in trade matters.

Lamy said the WTO’s new strategy on Doha is to set aside the big issues for now and instead concentrate on small wins, such as agreements on relatively uncontroversial trade areas like trade facilitation. The WEF said the WTO prefers to stay in a “quiet mode for now,” get things done and build confidence that it can then tackle big issues.

“You need a lot of political energy to do things multilaterally and it’s not just available,” Lamy said in a statement. “It’s in short supply, just as it is in climate change.” --Cai U. Ordinario