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Diming the Lights at the WTO?

Cancun Trade Talks Debacle

It appears that the hopes for a reduction in US and EU farm subsidies were as evanescent as hopes for a swift winning of the Iraqi peace.

There are growing signs that the so-called G20+, the group of 20-odd developing nations that brought the World Trade Organization's Doha Development Round of negotiations to a stop in Cancun, Mexico, in early September, are going to live to regret doing so.

It isn't necessarily their fault. The bigger concern is that the rich nations, particularly the United States and the European Union member countries, whose agricultural subsidies were the rock on which the talks foundered, will use their failure as a pretext simply to dim the lights at the WTO until they ultimately go out. The US is clearly increasingly preoccupied with conducting preferential bilateral agreements with individual nations. The momentum for world trade liberalization is slowing.

"I think the US and the European Union bear a heavy burden," Clyde Prestowitz, the US trade representative under former president Ronald Reagan, told Asia Times Online. "We can talk about the G20, but my view is that after all, if the US and the EU want to get something done, they can make it happen. The problem is that they haven't been able to get their act together, and the agriculture thing in both the US and the EU [is] insoluble. The two big guys can't solve their own domestic problems in a manner that would push the WTO forward, but they have the clout to be able to tear it [a]part by bilateral trade arrangements." [Emphasis added]