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G8 leaders, partners meet today to save Doha trade talks

SAINT PETERSBURG: The leaders of eight of the world’s most powerful nations join counterparts from five key emerging market countries here Monday to mount yet another bid to salvage a global trade liberalization campaign.

Presidents and prime ministers will try to smooth the way toward a successful conclusion to the Doha Round of trade talks, a prize that has eluded their trade ministers ever since the process got underway in the Qatari capital in late 2001.

With negotiations foundering, the rescue mission now falls to the Group of Eight — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States — aided by the heads of South Africa, Brazil, China, India and Mexico.o.

Their talks, on the third and final day of an annual G8 summit, come just two weeks after ministers meeting in Geneva again failed to agree on how to reduce barriers to world commerce in a way that would enable the developing world to taste the fruits of free trade.

But trade analysts have warned that while a strong summit statement may inject a sense of urgency into the negotiations, it is not clear that it will be enough to bridge the technical gaps holding up consensus.

“They should not talk about figures but simply say that the cost of a failure would be too high for the world economy,” a Brazilian diplomat at the World Trade Organization, which is organising the Doha Round, said last week. “We’re deadlocked. It’s time for heads of state to take up the matter,” he added.

Speaking in parliament last week British Prime Minister Tony Blair said: “This weekend may be one of the last opportunities we have got to re-start those talks productively and get the right agreement between Brazil and India and the developing countries on the one hand and America, Europe and Japan on the other.”

Blair was alluding to the core issues in the debate. The United States and Europe are pressing emerging and developing countries, in particular economic powerhouses such as Brazil and India, to make their markets more accessible to industrial goods and services.

Washington in turn is under heavy pressure to reduce the trade-distorting government subsidies it makes available to US farmers, while the European Union is being asked to make deeper cuts in the import duties it imposes on exports from poor countries. Each of the parties routinely pledges to go further but only on condition that others in the debate make concessions as well.

“We are ready to make an effort to get a deal if the others can also make that effort,” European Union Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said here Saturday.

In Washington on Friday US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez asserted: “No one has done more or gone further than the United States in these negotiations ... We came in with a very aggressive offer (and) no one has come close to matching what we have put on the table.”

Not surprisingly the Doha Round is deadlocked and in danger of missing an end-of-the-year target date for an overall agreement. Ordinarily multilateral trade talks face only self-imposed deadlines and could theoretically drag on for years.

But Doha negotiators are up against the expiration in mid-2007 of President George W Bush’s “fast track” negotiating authority, which authorizes the US Congress to approve or reject — but not amend — trade pacts negotiated by the White House.e. The fear is that Congressional forces hostile to freer trade — given the chance — would be tempted to scuttle a Doha deal that was seen to threaten US special interests. afp

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