Column: Global Trade

GLOBAL TRADE
Opposing Without Reason

Yesterday's goal hasn't become the starting point for tomorrow. We have backtracked and now don't want the Millennium Round.

By Bibek Debroy

The goal of yesterday will be the starting point of tomorrow
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

Bibek Debroy, Director, Rajiv Gandhi Institute For Contemporary Studies

November 9 to 13 is significant, because there will be a Ministerial Conference of WTO in Doha, Qatar. This is the fourth such conference. An ordinary Ministerial Conference, required once every two years, doesn't really matter that much. The first in Singapore in 1996 and the second in Geneva in 1998 are examples. However, like the third in Seattle in 1999, Doha is important because it is certain to launch a new round of trade talks, the Millennium Round.

Part of the problem with Seattle was that there was disagreement among countries (about the agenda) and ministers didn't have enough time to thrash these out.

This is unlikely to happen in Doha. Countries will be better prepared. And the Big Three (United States, EU, Japan) clearly want a new round, although the agenda is still uncertain. The g-8 summit in Genoa said as much. And if the Big Three want a round, there surely will be a round.

Contrast our position now with that before Seattle. At the time of Seattle, our negotiating stance seems to have been the following: Negotiate everything except labour and environmental standards and competition policy.

This is understandable, although one can have reservations about the opposition to competition policy. If the emphasis is on cross-border capital flows, and investment and distortions in developed countries are caused by private enterprise, we should push for inclusion of competition policy, not for its exclusion, especially now that we are likely to have the domestic law in place soon.

But that goal of yesterday hasn't become the starting point for tomorrow. Instead, we have backtracked and our negotiating stance seems to be that we don't want the Millennium Round. Please note that we are not objecting to inclusion of items like labour and environmental standards. That would have been understandable and we would have found a common cause with several other developing countries.

Instead, we are objecting to the idea of the round per se. If we think we have support for this outlandish stance, we are sadly mistaken. As it happened with the Uruguay Round build-up in the mid-1980s, major developing countries will ditch us.

What are we trying to do? Adopt the leadership mantle of developing countries? Why don't we learn from our mistakes? Or are we destined to repeat history as tragedy and farce combined?

We may have some support from sub-Saharan Africa. Even that is debatable, since the leadership mantle of LDCs has now been usurped by Bangladesh.

Indeed, the promise of the Uruguay Round liberalisation on market access didn't materialise. In a recent study titled Market Access: Unfinished Business, the WTO has itself documented this (You can download the study).

But the problems lie with agreements signed in 1993-94, not with their violation. If we want to re-negotiate these agreements, we need a new round and perhaps an acknowledgement that we made mistakes in 1993-94.

We ought to have no problems in discussing industrial tariffs, trips, agriculture, services, or anti-dumping. In any case, trips and agriculture are part of the built-in agenda. Discussions on these go on, regardless of the Millennium Round. I suspect we are being perverse because of the opposition. Not the Congress, which has come out in favour of a new round, but opposition from the RSS and the SJM.

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