Selected aspects of international trade and the World Trade Organization's Doha round: overview and introduction.

AuthorNanda, Ved P.

I.

International trade is credited with alleviating poverty for hundreds of millions in the world, especially in India and China. (1) However, not all have benefited from it. To illustrate, Africa's share in the world trade has declined since the 1990s, and sub-Saharan countries have been marginalized. The United Nations Development Program reported in 2005 that if Africa could have maintained the share of global export that it had in 1980, its export earnings would have been about $119 billion higher then. (2) The report noted that "the share of world export of sub-Saharan Africa, with 689 million people, is less than one half that of Belgium, with ten million people." (3)

Multilateral trade negotiations are always complex and never easy to conclude. The current "Doha Round," formally called the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), was launched with high expectations in November 2001 in Doha, Qatar, after the failed Ministerial Meeting in Seattle in 1999. Conceived as a development round, it was scheduled to be concluded in 2005 and is still awaiting completion. The Director General of the WTO, Pascal Lamy, had earlier suspended the Doha Round Talks in July 2006 following a meeting of the principal negotiating countries--the United States, the European Community, Japan, Austria, Brazil, and India--as no agreement could be reached on agricultural issues--both subsidies and tariff and quota protections--which remain the most contentious during this round.

Two years later, Lamy convened a meeting of the world trade minister in Geneva the week of July 21, 2008, "to bridge gaps in your positions," and in the belief that "the chances are reaching agreement this month are better than 50 percent." (4) On July 4, in an open memorandum to the trade ministers, he said:

The coming weeks represent the moment of truth for the Doha Round. If we are to conclude the Doha Round, we must strike a deal this month on trade in agriculture and industrial goods, provide clear signals on opening services markets and clear the decks on the remaining issues. (5) To the ministers "from our poorest and weakest members," his message was: "You know this agreement will create new opportunities in the global marketplace and, coupled with an effective Aid for Trade package, could transform entire sections of your economy." (6) Subsequently, in opening the meeting of the Trade Negotiations Committee on July 21, 2008, Lamy said that for the action to conclude the Doha Round by the end of 2008 he could think of "no stronger spur.., than the threats which are facing the world community across several fronts, including rises in food prices and energy prices and financial market turbulences." He added, "There is widespread recognition that a balanced outcome of the Doha Round could in these circumstances could provide a strong push to stimulate economic growth, providing better prospects for development and ensuring a stable and more predictable trading system." (7)

II.

There was a broad consensus in the 1980s that the weakness of the GATT must be corrected for the functioning of a viable multilateral trading system. The Uruguay Round negotiations were launched in September 1986, which were contemplated to last four years, but the Round was eventually signed in April 1994. The outcome was a most comprehensive trade agreement. Its success included the establishment of a framework of rules and commitments. It further reduced tariffs, opened up new markets and expanded the GATT reach by bringing under multilateral trade rules trade related to services, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, investment, and intellectual property, and by extending some multilateral disciplines to textile and clothing and agricultural issues. Its crowning achievement, however, has to be the creation of a new institution, the World Trade Organization, as the successor to GATT, which indeed heralded the transformation of the new international trading system.

In his appraisal of the Uruguay Round, the former Director General of GATT/WTO, Peter Sutherland, observes that developing countries were not "really left out of the process," while conceding that "the demands the Uruguay Round made on some developing countries were considerable and sometimes beyond their means. The need for capacity building and technical assistance was underestimated and only in recent years has that lack of support been corrected." (8) He acknowledges "the terrible reality that some of the poorest States are denied access to the trading system because they have neither the necessary human nor physical infrastructure." (9) The current Director General Lamy concurs:

[W]hile political decolonization took place more than 50 years ago, we have not yet completed economic decolonization. A fundamental aspect of the current Round of trade negotiations--the DDA--is to correct thee remaining imbalances in the trade rules in favor of developing countries and to improve the rules by providing developing countries with authentic market opportunities. (10) Notwithstanding these successes, the major criticism of the Uruguay Round is that overall the developing countries received little benefit from the negotiations. Although they were granted phase-in periods in many instances for assuming new obligations, developing countries faced large adjustment costs and lacked the necessary institutions, physical infrastructure and human resources to take advantage of these concessions. Also, developed countries failed to fulfill their promises to provide enhanced market access for developing countries and make significant reductions in trade-distorting agricultural subsidies.

III.

In contrast to the Uruguay Round, the Doha Round has emphasized the developing countries' needs. The developing countries were actively engaged through the participation process in producing the Doha Development Agenda, which indeed was the beginning of a new era, for in all the prior eight WTO rounds, a small number of the developed countries were involved in the so-called Green Room negotiations, where they made the major decisions for all members. The reach of the Agenda, however, was seen by several developing countries as too extensive and ambitious, as they were concerned about their limited resources to effectively address the so-called "Singapore issues"--investment, competition policy, government procurement, and trade facilitation--as well as the inclusion of electronic commerce; the European Communities had insisted on the inclusion of these issues. But for the trade facilitation issue, the others were eventually dropped.

The Doha Ministerial Declaration of November 14, 2001, (11) contains several elements related to development and alleviation of poverty. Among other benefits, developing countries would gain from technical assistance and capacity-building programs and from enhanced market access. The least developed countries (LDCs), (12) left behind and marginalized in the multilateral trading system, would be assisted so as to become effective participants.

The Doha Declaration calls for negotiation on outstanding implementation issues of special concern to developing countries and adopts the Decision on Implementation-Related Issues and Concerns, (13) under which members expressed their determination "to take concrete action" to address implementation concerns of developing countries, including obstacles to implementation such as resource constraints. It includes, along with general implementation concerns, those related to specific agreements, such as the Agreement on Agriculture, the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, the Agreement on Rules of Origin, and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. The members also committed to negotiations on agricultural issues aimed at improving market access and reducing all forms of subsidies, reducing trade-distorting domestic support, and to negotiations aimed at reducing or eliminating tariff and non-tariff barriers to non-agricultural products, and negotiation on services.

The Doha Declaration especially addresses three issues of special importance to developing countries--trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPs), technical cooperation and capacity-building, and special and differential treatment. It also makes special provisions for LDCs.

The Declaration calls upon the Council for TRIPs to study the relationship between the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and TRIPs, paying special attention to development. (14) It emphasizes that TRIPs should be interpreted and implemented "in a manner supportive of public health, by promoting both access to existing medicines and research and development into new medicines." (15) On technical cooperation and capacity building, growth and integration, the Declaration endorses the New Strategy for WTO Technical Cooperation for Capacity Building, Growth and Integration, and calls upon the Secretariat to support efforts to bring trade into national development and poverty reduction plans. (16) It also calls for the WTO to devise a plan for long-term funding of WTO technical assistance. (17)

The Declaration notes the developing country-proposed 2001 Framework Agreement on Special and Differential Treatment, (18) which had contended that the Uruguay Round had resulted in a "dramatic erosion" of Special and Differential Treatment (S&DT). (19) The Declaration agrees to review all S&DT provisions "with a view to strengthening them and making them more precise, effective and operational," and endorses the work program set out in the Decision on Implementation-Related Issues and Concerns. (20) Responding to the concern that few of the several S&DT provisions in the Uruguay Round Agreements are legally enforceable, it calls on...

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