World Trade Talks Collapse After 7 Years
By Cernig
Seven years worth of World Trade Organisation talks have collapsed in a day, and most of those involved seem to be pointing the finger at the U.S. You might have missed it if you were following the media's chase after the Mccain campaign's lead to determine if Obama is more like Paris or Britney, but it's going to affect your own weekly shop far more.
The British news media, however, have noticed.
The negotiations foundered because the United States could not agree with China and India on import rules.
But the World Trade Organization chief, Pascal Lamy, said he would not abandon his efforts to find an agreement.
The main stumbling block was farm import rules, which allow countries to protect poor farmers by imposing a tariff on certain goods in the event of a drop in prices or a surge in imports.
India, China and the US could not agree on the tariff threshold for such an event.
Washington said that the "safeguard clause" protecting developing nations from unrestricted imports had been set too low.
India's trade minister, Kamal Nath, today accused the United States of putting the livelihoods of a billion of the world's poorest people against "commercial interests" as each country blamed the other for the acrimonious collapse of world trade talks in Geneva.
As ministers from more than 30 countries prepared to leave the World Trade Organisation's Swiss headquarters after nine fruitless and exhausting days of negotiations, the bitter atmosphere between leading players underlined fears that the WTO's Doha round could take years to revive.
Visibly angry, Nath told journalists: "The most important thing was the livelihood security, the vulnerability of poor farmers, which could not be traded off against the commercial interests of the developed countries." He said his position was supported by 100 countries, representing a billion subsistence farmers.
The talks — the latest attempt to complete the seven-year-long trade round — collapsed late yesterday, over India's insistence that developing countries must be able to protect their agricultural sector against sudden surges of subsidised imports from the US and EU.
The European Union's trade chief Peter Mandelson said on Wednesday the United States helped to bring down global trade talks this week when its negotiators shunned a compromise proposal at a key juncture in the talks.
The United States hit back and accused the EU of having tried to undo a carefully crafted set of compromises because it was under fire from European governments including France.
The proposal in question was drawn up by the EU on Tuesday in a last-gasp bid to unblock an impasse over an agricultural trade issue being discussed by seven powers at the centre of the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks.
Mandelson initially declined to point fingers, calling the collapse of the talks a collective failure. But his frustration at Washington was clear in a weblog he wrote on Wednesday, describing the events of the previous day when the talks failed.
"...when WTO chief (Pascal) Lamy reconvenes the Group of Seven negotiators at midday, the Indians and the Chinese express reservations and the U.S. rejects the proposal outright, much to Lamy's understandable frustration," Mandelson said.
"It seems that the issue on which we have diverged is more important for some than agreement as a whole. Instead of reaching out for help to solve the problem, they are digging in," he said.
After that, a U.S. official "simply does not show up" when negotiations resume and U.S. trade chief Susan Schwab, heading into the finale of the negotiations, stopped off in the press room "to get her rebuttal in first," Mandelson wrote.
"The session that follows is tense and angry and Lamy does not allow it to go on for long," he said.
"It is bad enough to be facing defeat in the last mile of such a marathon. It's worse to realize that some of the people across the table, instead of working for success, are in reality preparing for failure."
I find it utterly amazing, and disgusting, that the major networks and print news outelts seem to think the Persidential Idol part of the 2008 race is far more important and worthy of endless time spent than simply asking the candidates their views and policies on such fundementals. Maybe they'll figure it out when the cost of your weekly grocery shop is so high that you can no longer afford cable, a TV or even a newspaper.
Can we haz a better media?
While I agree that the press should be covering this I wouldn't really mind if they torpedoed the entire WTO which is nothing more than a modern day equivalent of feudalism.
Posted by: Ron Beasley | July 30, 2008 at 10:45 PM