BY ASIM ERDILEK
TODAY`S ZAMAN - Last week`s Seventh Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, attended by some 3,000 delegates from 153 members, didn`t disappoint in living up to its modest expectations. The group didn`t even bother to issue a final declaration, since following the two-and-a-half day meeting it had nothing substantial to declare despite its general theme of `The WTO, the Multilateral Trading System and the Current Global Economic Environment.` Even the street protests by people opposed to the WTO`s role in globalization failed to match the violent `Battle in Seattle` from its meeting in Washington state 10 years ago. The WTO`s Ministerial Conference, its highest level decision-making body, is supposed to convene at least once every two years. But last week`s conference came long after the December 2005 Hong Kong meeting. These are serious indications of the WTO`s shaky presence and diminished authority in coping with the complex problems in global trade and myriad trade-related issues as world trade has suffered its most drastic decline in 80 years. The WTO`s problems are bound to get even more complex if and when the global climate change controversy, which will be the subject of this week`s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, leads to disputes over trade restrictions on the exports of countries that either fail to join or inadequately enforce a global climate agreement.
One would have expected, naturally, that the immediate and urgent task of this conference would be to break the gridlock in the eight-year-old Doha Round multilateral trade talks. But WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said that it wouldn`t be a negotiating session and that although the officials would consider the Doha Round, they would focus on other matters instead, `like a shareholders` meeting to review annual activities and priorities,` things boring for journalists. It would be `a platform for ministers to review the functioning of this house (the WTO) and an occasion to send a number of strong signals to the world with respect to the entire WTO waterfront of issues.` Lamy was evidently discouraged by the last failed ministerial-level attempt to revive the Doha Round in July 2008 and didn`t want to risk another embarrassing failure. It is perhaps unfair to expect Lamy, or even the WTO, to single-handedly revive the Doha Round when the three G-20 economic summits, after repeated declarations, have not been able to do so.
Lamy, as well as most trade ministers, including Turkey`s Zafer Caglayan, called for the speedy conclusion of the Doha Round, many setting 2010 as yet another deadline, with the WTO Website bragging that the ministers had shown `political energy` regarding this. But the reality was different, with almost everyone agreeing that the domestic political obstacles in WTO member countries, especially in the US, to concluding the Doha Round successfully during the still-fragile recovery from the global economic crisis look insurmountable. This reality check prompted the proposal to chop up the Doha Round`s 20-topic agenda into politically acceptable bites and negotiate several more manageable mini-deals, especially outside of the most intractable agricultural issues. But Lamy said at the end of the conference that unless all members agree to split the Doha Round into several mini-deals, it would remain a `single undertaking,` an all-or-nothing deal. He stressed the advantages of such a deal, which enables the most comprehensive multilateral exchange of concessions among the maximum number of member countries. There were also attempts to strike pluri-lateral deals among groups of members, such as an industrial tariff reduction agreement among 22 emerging market economies - not, however, including China. We can view these attempts from the perspective of the recent proliferation of bilateral and regional trade agreements, which although compatible with the WTO rules under certain conditions, work against both the spirit and objectives of global trade negotiations such as the Doha Round.