Like “watching paint that never dries” is how Sheila Page of the Overseas Development Institute, a London think-tank, describes the experience of following the Doha round of global trade negotiations. Launched in 2001 by the members of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the talks seek to cut tariffs and farm subsidies, as well as liberalizing trade in services. On July 25th, hopes of an unlikely deal, brokered by Pascal Lamy, the WTO’s relentless director-general, at a summit in Geneva, briefly rose. But on July 29th, after nine days of negotiations, the mix turned gloopy once again.

From the start, the round’s chief ambition was to straighten out some of the kinks in agricultural trade. This ancient activity, which accounts for only 8 percent of world merchandise trade, is the most heavily distorted by misbegotten policies. It is, therefore, in agriculture that an agreement could do the most good. But it was also in agriculture that the agreement came unstuck.
The failure of this round was rooted in the success of the last. The 1994 Uruguay round, named after its country of launch, required countries to convert their farm quotas and other barriers into straightforward tariffs. Nervous about unanticipated floods of imports, countries were allowed to impose “special safeguard” duties to protect themselves in the event of a surge.
Intended as a temporary fix, these duties soon became a long-term crutch for politically touchy commodities, such as sugar. Hungary, for example, clung to them for almost five years. Rather than drop these safeguards altogether, the Doha negotiators agreed to reform them, but they could not agree on how to do so. India wanted the right to raise farm tariffs far above agreed ceilings in response to a modest increase in imports. China was equally adamant. It seems to have concluded that the best response to high food prices is to move closer to agricultural autarky than to free trade.
America insisted that its farmers be allowed to sell more produce in countries like China, which buys around 40 percent of its soyabeans. Otherwise it could not win support for tighter limits on its subsidies.
The shadow of the Uruguay round arguably extended beyond this nettlesome detail. Many developing countries believe that the earlier round was lopsided, doing little to constrain the farm policies of the rich world even as it placed heavy obligations on the poor in areas such as intellectual property (IP). In the Doha round, they wanted to get their own back, by asking more of the rich world than they offered in return. As a result, this round was if anything too narrow, not too sprawling. Had IP rights still been on the table, for example, it is harder to imagine rich countries allowing talks to fail on behalf of their farmers.
And yet fail they did. The deal ministers left on the table was full of loopholes and loose ends. But two economists at the World Bank, Will Martin and Aaditya Mattoo, have tried to size up its rough dimensions. Their calculations help to quantify what might have been.
The chart shows the proposed cuts in the maximum tariffs countries are allowed to apply (averaged across products, and including various exemptions). In agriculture especially, the cuts seem impressive. But because these negotiated ceilings are so much higher than the tariffs countries actually impose, even quite big cuts can make only a modest difference to trade.
In rich countries, for example, the farm tariffs actually imposed would have fallen from 15 percent on average to 11 percent, according to the two economists. In India, on the other hand, the average (59 percent) would not have budged at all. Set against this are some less tangible but still worthwhile boons. By binding tariffs near to the prevailing rate, a Doha agreement would have stopped policies taking a dramatic turn for the worse. South Korea, for example, had farm tariffs averaging just 7 percent in the 1960s. Some have since reached triple digits.
What about subsidies? Before the breakdown, America had contemplated limiting its trade-distorting subsidies to $14.5 billion. That limit was far more than it actually spent last year, but less than it spent in four of the last seven years, when farm prices were lower. So according to Kimberly Elliott of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank in Washington, DC, the developing countries had won a modest but not meaningless concession from the world’s most powerful country. Some also believe America would have offered an ambitious cut in its cotton subsidies, which are of particular concern to West African exporters. Africa’s spokesman in Geneva was as disappointed as anyone by the breakdown of the talks.
That disappointment might prove to be corrosive. In the wake of this failure, will the WTO remain useful enough to the big powers to retain their support and patronage? Will Lamy himself stay beyond his four-year term, which ends in September 2009? Without his dogged persistence, the Geneva summit might never have taken place and would certainly have ended four days (and sleepless nights) earlier. Some exhausted negotiators might count that a jolly good thing. But according to Pascal’s wager, a director-general who keeps faith in the round has little to lose. One without faith is sure to fail.
(Source: Economist)