By Stephen Castle

When global trade talks ran into the night in Geneva in the summer of 2006, so many negotiators crammed into one room that they faced an unpalatable choice: keep the windows closed and swelter - or open them and fend off swarms of insects from the parkland outside.
For ministers preparing for new negotiations starting Monday, the good news is that their meeting room will be air-conditioned. The bad news is that it may be even fuller than two years ago - and talks may last even longer.
Started seven years ago, the Doha Development Agenda - the official name for the trade talks - comes to a climax in the week ahead. Negotiations, expected to last six days, will determine whether or not a global trade agreement is within reach.
The talks will test whether the rickety structures that govern global trade can accommodate the rise of new and assertive economic powers such as China, Brazil and India.
According to the European Union negotiator, Peter Mandelson, a failure in Geneva would make agreement impossible for at least two years and harm multilateral negotiations on other topics such as climate change.
If talks collapse, there will be another casualty: the credibility of the World Trade Organization itself.
And even if ministers agree on the outline of a deal at their marathon meeting, some wonder whether this might be the last negotiation of this kind. With economic power distributed more equally around the globe than ever before, world trade negotiations have become as cumbersome as they are slow.
“The question,” said Joe Guinan, a trade expert with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy group, “is whether rounds of trade negotiations that take around a decade can keep pace with the economic changes. The answer is probably not.”
The bare facts about the upcoming negotiations illustrate the problems.
When the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, entered into force in 1948, there were 23 countries who agreed to be bound by it. Today the WTO, the successor to GATT, has 153 members, all of whom will be represented in this round of talks by diplomats, if not cabinet-level ministers. For example, Canada’s official delegation will number about 40 but - counting representatives of provincial government, farming, trade and other bodies - a total of around 150 Canadians will converge on Geneva.
Countries organize themselves into subgroups, such as the G20 or G33, which have similar (but not identical) interests. Even so, the key negotiations, that take place in the so-called Green Room will include about 35 to 40 ministers.
The person who will manage this game of multidimensional chess is Pascal Lamy, a cerebral, ascetic Frenchman and former European trade commissioner who is now director general of the WTO. His is not an enviable task.
Negotiations test the stamina of participants and sometimes go through the night.
What remains unclear is whether even sleepless nights can bring a deal, as an accelerating eastward shift of global economic power makes the negotiation ever harder.
An agreement between the European Union and the United States used to be biggest building block of any agreement, and a grouping known as the Quad - made up of the EU, United States, Canada and Japan - was extremely powerful.
The rise of China, Brazil and India has altered the balance of power fundamentally. The Quad has not held a significant meeting for several years.
The support of the Brazilian trade negotiator, Celso Amorim, and his Indian counterpart, Kamal Nath, is now indispensable for any deal.
Developing nations account for three-quarters of the membership of the WTO. Poorer countries only agreed to the round of talks on the basis that it had a development focus - hence the official title of Doha Development Agenda - and have been increasingly assertive as a consequence.
But India’s agenda, for example, is complicated. It is nervous about the impact of opening up its agricultural markets on its millions of subsistence farmers. But it is interested in gaining access to Western markets for its well-qualified software experts.
Though Beijing tends to keep a lower public profile in trade negotiations, its economic might lurks beneath the surface. For example, Latin American countries are resisting European and American demands for reduced tariffs on industrial goods in part because that would open their markets to more Chinese exports.
Even before the Geneva talks start, a longstanding dispute over European banana tariffs threatens to derail the whole negotiation. On this issue Latin American banana-producing nations are at odds with the former European colonies who have enjoyed preferential terms. Neither group agrees on a new tariff regime proposed by Lamy and accepted by the European Commission.
The banana tariff is an example of how one relatively specific issue could destroy a broader deal.
But the bigger picture is that Doha provokes little interest among Western voters, and its supporters have failed to persuade advocacy groups of its benefits to the Third World.
“If the deal on the table goes through, millions of the world’s most vulnerable people stand to lose their jobs and fall into poverty,” John Hilary, executive director of War on Want, an anti-poverty group based in London, said in a statement.
Many believe that the WTO itself needs to change. Guinan suggests a relaxation of the “single undertaking,” which enshrines the negotiating principle that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.
A change would allow coalitions of willing countries to broker sectoral agreements - for example, on chemicals.
Guinan also thinks that the WTO secretariat, or permanent staff, should be strengthened, and its head, the director general, given the right of initiative, or the power to convene meetings, as well as the ability to provide more technical support to trade talks.
Another idea that has been floated has been to end the principle under which all countries, however small, have a veto on the trade round.
Meanwhile, a new report from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany and the Center for Economic Policy Research in the United States argues that trade rounds, which are so long that they extend beyond the main countries’ political cycles, need to be more limited in objectives - focusing, for example, on the goal of increasing market access.
However, most changes have downsides.
Adopting a system of majority voting, similar to that which the EU uses for many of its decisions, would be highly risky because it might strain nations’ willingness to accept the verdict of the WTO disputes settlement machinery. If a country had been outvoted on an aspect of a trade deal, it might find it politically impossible to implement a panel decision that later went against it.
Meanwhile, allowing groups of countries to make sectoral deals would undermine one of the key ingredients of a trade round: the ability to trade concessions in one sector for gains in another.
Failure in Geneva would deal a further blow to economic confidence just as key economies face a slowdown. It would damage the WTO, leading to more bilateral trade deals that, critics argue, often distort trade.
In the end, the fact that the stakes are so high is probably one of the few reasons for optimism that the talks will succeed.
“It might be,” said the European official, “that the era of trade rounds is not yet dead, that people decide it is the worst idea possible - apart from the rest.”
(Source: International Herald Tribune)