WTO MINISTERIAL MEETINGS

Nov-Dec 1999 Seattle

First attempt to launch a new trade round fails amid violent clashes between police and anti-globalisation protesters

Nov 2001 Doha

Round launched in surge of solidarity following September 11 terrorist attacks on the US

Sep 2003 Cancun

WTO members fail to agree a blueprint - known in WTO jargon as ‘modalities’ - for concluding the talks by the original deadline of end-2004

Jul 2004 Geneva

Framework agreement is approved laying down some broad principles for negotiation of modalities

Dec 2005 Hong Kong

Members must decide upon a new deadline early next year for agreeing modalities and approve a “development package” for the poorest countries

The Doha round of global trade talks, now in its seventh year, broke up without agreement on Tuesday after nine days of tense negotiations.

Sharp divisions between the US, India and China about access to agricultural markets in the developing world could not be bridged and the talks came to a grinding halt, scuppering efforts by Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organisation, to broker a compromise.

The failure marks the third summer in a row that ministers have left a high-profile summit empty-handed. Several ministers and officials admitted that any substantive progress would now have to wait until a new US president was in the White House.

The breakdown followed several marathon negotiating sessions among ministers from the world’s leading economies, with the talks running on long after their original schedule.

Tempers occasionally flared, with the US and China accusing each other of not making enough concessions. But in the immediate aftermath, there was relatively little trading of blame.

Susan Schwab, US trade representative, said the US remained committed to the Doha round. “This is not a time to talk about collapse,” she said. “The US commitments remain on the table.”

Peter Mandelson, European Union trade commissioner, said: ”I realise that you will ask who is to blame for this failure. The answer of course is that it is a collective failure.”

But Mr Mandelson said that the agriculture talks had been harmed by the five-year programme of agricultural subsidies recently passed by the US Congress, which he said was ”one of the most reactionary farm bills in the history of the US”, though he did give credit to President George W.Bush for attempting to veto the bill.

The meetings, which nearly broke down at the end of last week, got a new lease of life when a draft agreement circulated by Mr Lamy was accepted as a basis for negotiations. But renewed tensions between China, India and the US proved insurmountable.

Mr Lamy defended his decision to call a meeting of ministers when large negotiating gaps remained between delegations.

“None of the ministers to whom I have put this question told me I should not have done it,” he said. “The reason they believe this is just getting where we are now, and constructing – on the basis of seven years’ negotiation – a bridge towards the end, was worthwhile.”

Several ministers said the issue on which the talks had foundered – a mechanism allowing countries such as India and China to protect farmers from surges in imports – was a relatively small part of the talks, and there had been good progress in issues such as the long-running dispute over banana imports to the EU.

But they admitted it was not clear whether those gains could be preserved and picked up again at a later date.

Kamal Nath, Indian trade minister, said: “It is unfortunate in a development round, this is the last mile we couldn’t run because of an issue of livelihood security.” But he said India’s confidence in the WTO and the multilateral system remained intact. “I’m very disappointed this had to be the final result,” he said.

So what exactly is the Doha round?

The talks, named after the capital of the Gulf state of Qatar in which it was launched in 2001, are broad-ranging negotiations to liberalise trade in agriculture, industrial goods and services among the World Trade Organisation’s 153 member countries. The talks also cover some smaller issues such as tightening up the rules under which international trade is conducted and making it easier for exporters to get goods across borders.

　

Why did it break down?

Fundamentally, the same problems that have bedevilled the talks for years: the desire of some big emerging market countries, particularly India and China, to retain the right to protect farmers and manufacturers they say are vulnerable to international competition. On the other side, the US – and to some extent the EU – have demanded access to those markets in return for cutting their own support for farmers. All sides could not agree an acceptable trade-off.

　

So it’s just a rich versus poor thing?

No. The developing world is split on some of these issues. Highly efficient agricultural exporters such as Brazil and Uruguay also want access to farm markets in countries such as India, but tend to be less vocal about it than the US.

　

What happens now?

Some officials put on a brave face and said they would come back in the autumn. But with the US election fast approaching, it seems unlikely that a substantial meeting of ministers could take place before a new president enters the White House.

Would a successful deal make much difference?

Not much, at least immediately. Most estimates of the impact of a Doha agreement on the global economy are of the order of $100bn (€64bn, £50bn), or about 0.1 per cent. And because the very poorest countries in the world already have special access to the markets of the rich world, the value of which would be reduced by a general cut in import tariffs, they might actually lose out as a result of a deal.

　

Why so little effect?

WTO negotiations cover the “bound rates” – the legal maximum to which countries can raise their import tariffs or farm subsidies – rather than the “applied rates” they are actually using at present. The gap between the two is known as “water”. Since applied rates are often a long way below bound rates, WTO agreements often “cut water” rather than immediately reducing real-world tariffs and subsidies. The US, for example, is offering a $14.4bn ceiling on those farm subsidies deemed to distort international trade. But because those payments are linked to prices and commodity markets have boomed recently, the US is currently paying out only $7bn-$9bn to farmers.
　

　

So why bother signing it?

One good reason is as an insurance policy. Agreeing new “bound rate” ceilings for tariffs stops them being raised suddenly, thus reducing the risk that the world could slide back into the kind of tit-for-tat protectionism that it saw in the 1930s. Patrick Messerlin, an economics professor at Sciences-Politiques, the Paris-based university and research institute, says that Doha should be thought of as the “binding round”. At the moment, he says, big emerging economies such as India, Mexico and Brazil could more than triple their tariffs on farm products and industrial goods at any time without breaking WTO rules.

　

Will the WTO itself
suffer without a deal?

Immediately, no. In the medium term, possibly yes. The WTO does more than just negotiate liberalisation deals. It also runs a dispute settlement system which adjudicates whether countries are breaking existing rules. This has, for example, forced reform of the EU’s complex and expensive sugar support regime and compelled the US Congress to repeal rules on corporation tax. If governments cannot agree trade pacts through negotiation under the WTO, they may be more reluctant to abide by the rules already in place.

Alan Beattie

　

Like Wimbledon fortnight but without the aesthetic or entertainment value, the annual breakdown of the Doha round of trade talks is becoming a summer ritual. For three successive years, dark warnings of now-or-never and one-last-chance have ended in a fruitless ministerial meeting. It is time to be brave, swallow hard and accept that the Doha round in its present form has failed.

No one can say it has not had its chances. It cycles with increasing – and increasingly risible – frequency through rising optimism and crashing despair. Doha has always struggled. Launched with a huge agenda shortly after the attacks of September 11 2001, substantially for symbolic reasons, it lacked the big push from export interests needed to overcome the fierce resistance to liberalising agriculture, its main focus.

The longer it drags on the less relevant it seems. Doha addresses the world of the late 1990s when food prices were low, concern over global warming muted and the US and the European Union massively outpunched the likes of China, India and Brazil in economic and diplomatic heft.

The proximate cause of failure this week was an arcane issue: a stand-off between the US, India and China over rules protecting small farmers from surges in food imports. But that merely underlines the lack of political will to complete this round and how the critical players have failed to confront their own domestic constituencies.

Whether the White House could have sold any agriculture deal to Capitol Hill is highly uncertain: it showed far too little backbone too late to prevent America’s farm lobby pushing another absurd subsidy bill through Congress. India’s government, worried about losing the votes of its farming villages, acts like a country that would be much happier without a deal.

Meanwhile, though the EU has been out of the line of fire recently, its own truculent member states prevented it offering more than a modest cut in farm tariffs. As for China, the country that will soon be the world’s biggest exporter, Beijing cannot perpetually use its status as a recently joined World Trade Organisation member to avoid undertaking more liberalisation.

Some progress was made in talks this week. But as Celso Amorim, Brazil’s redoubtable foreign minister, pointed out, it is wishful thinking to assume that those gains can be banked. Next year the world will have new administrations in the White House, the European Commission and, quite likely, New Delhi. (Probably not in Beijing, however.) They will not be bound by late-night conditional pledges wrung out of their predecessors a year earlier.

Doha’s defenders say that euthanising it will sap confidence in the multilateral system and encourage a stampede into bilateral and regional preferential trade agreements (PTAs) that distort trade rather than freeing it. But Doha’s stasis is already eroding the WTO’s credibility, and partial deals are already proliferating. It is no longer a question of getting Doha done to save the WTO; it is, regrettably, now largely a question of saving the WTO from Doha.

So what should be done instead? The WTO must preserve the principle of negotiating trade collectively. Worthwhile multilateral trade deals are possible. It must also set rules: certain members (particularly the US) may be reluctant to abide by the decisions of the WTO’s dispute settlement system if they cannot write its laws.

The WTO should try two things: first, take on smaller, more manageable legislative projects among coalitions of the willing; second, try to extend consistent rules over more of the existing system.

For the first project, it could start by gathering together the few countries that dominate world trade in services and hammering out a standalone deal in sectors where it can find convergence. Last weekend’s fruitful services talks were an encouraging sign, especially now that developing countries such as India are powerful service exporters as well as importers. The benefits, on the model of the successful Information Technology Agreement of 1996, would then be extended to all WTO members. Several parts of the Doha deal such as export subsidies and “trade facilitation” (getting goods easily across borders) might also be agreed separately.

Second, rather than railing im­potently against the rash of PTAs, the WTO could use the powers it already has to try to enforce their compliance with existing multilateral rules.

The world’s new leaders should collectively seize the chance to take the WTO in a direction where it can regain momentum. The weight of experience over six and a half years suggests that Doha as currently constituted is not that direction. It is, regrettably, time to let it go.

If there was a single thing that ministers and officials in Geneva appeared to agree on on Tuesday night it was that this was not the end of the Doha round. But there were few clues to how or when it could be revived.

Pascal Lamy, the World Trade Organisation’s chief, said he expected he would attempt to revive the Doha talks for a global trade deal but it was not possible to say how or when that might happen.

“I will have to discuss this with the members but my initial reaction is not a reaction of ‘throw in the towel’,” he said after nine days of talks failed to achieve a breakthrough on the core elements of the Doha round.

Celso Amorim, the Brazilian foreign minister, who had been in the inner core of the talks throughout the past nine days, offered a football analogy.

Mr Amorim, whose country and particularly its hyper-efficient farm export sector has a lot to lose from the failure to reach a deal, said that the talks had come agonisingly close to a significant breakthrough. If he were the coach of a football team, he said, “I would replace the players and still see if a result was possible.”

But there is no guarantee that any of the stars likely to feature on a new team sheet would perform any better than the current squad.

Realistically, with the US election approaching and the authority of President George W. Bush’s administration to strike a deal already ebbing away, there will almost certainly be a new president in the White House by the time the WTO is in a position to call a new ministerial meeting. If the current polls are right, that president will be a Democrat who has handed out several hostages to trade-sceptic fortune on the primary campaign trail.

There may also be a new government in India, headed by a less instinctive liberaliser than the current prime minister, Manmohan Singh. His administration only narrowly survived a confidence vote last week and he must call a new election by next May. By spring next year the process of appointing a new European Commission will also be well in train.

And whoever those new policymakers turn out to be, the pressures on them may well push them further away from agreeing more liberalisation. Brazil’s Mr Amorim was frank about the optimistic plan that several ministers had suggested, that the WTO try to preserve what concessions had been made and come back to build on them later.

“People say we should preserve what we have,” he said. “But it is not in our power. Life goes on. You will have the food crisis. You will have other crises. Protectionist interests will again present themselves. It will be very difficult to keep this intact.”

As Susan Schwab, the US trade representative, pointed out, there was an irony in the issue on which this week’s talks broke down – a mechanism to allow developing countries such as India to defend their farmers from sudden surges in imports. The present food price crisis has led to a shortage of farm produce in international markets, not a glut. But many emerging-market coun­tries seem to have drawn the conclusion from the food crisis that they need to keep more production at home. Such fears will be slow to reverse even if food prices fall heavily back.

Another unknown in the talks is the evolving position of China, one of the few big players in the talks whose political continuity between now and next year is pretty much guaranteed. Beijing has taken a back seat in much of the Doha negotiations so far, despite urgings from the US to take a leading role.

This week Washington got its wish – but not in the way it wanted. China broke cover on Monday, publicly accusing the US of hypocrisy for heavily subsidising its own cotton farmers – one of the Americans’ most sensitive and vulnerable points – while asking other countries to expose theirs to harsh competition. Beijing pointed out that it had already had to undertake rapid liberalisation as the price of joining the WTO in 2001, at the same meeting that launched the Doha round.

If it sticks with that position – and with the extra leeway given it as a nation that only recently joined the WTO – it is likely to continue attracting opprobrium from the US.

The most likely outcome will be that senior officials below ministerial level reconvene in the autumn, to sift through the debris of the talks from the past week and see if anything can be salvaged to form the framework of a new deal. But any attempt to put the pieces back together will very likely be a much longer time in coming.

Many aid and development groups claiming to speak for poor countries were swift to applaud this week’s breakdown of global trade talks, arguing the prospective deal would have worked against development interests.

Yet negotiators for the poorest and most vulnerable nations were in no doubt on Wednesday that they stood to be big losers from the collapse of the talks, as potential accords on cotton subsidies, bananas and duty-free exports to industrial markets evaporated.

“The impact of failure is going to be substantial,” said Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s trade minister. “It’s always the poorest of the poor who carry the biggest burden.”

African cotton farmers, who had hoped for a big cut in US cotton subsidies as part of a Doha deal, were one of this week’s biggest casualties. “The impact will be very grave,” said Mamadou Sanou, trade minister for Burkina Faso, which also speaks for three other West African cotton producers, Mali, Senegal and Benin.

Without cuts in rich-country cotton subsidies, which depress prices and undercut poor farmers, the industry in Africa faced the threat of extinction, he said. About 10m people in West Africa depend on cotton for their livelihoods.

The US agreed in 2004 that cotton subsidies would be reduced further and faster than overall farm subsidies, as part of a Doha round accord. The draft text up for agreement at the ministerial meeting included a proposal for cuts in cotton subsidies of more than 80 per cent. But without a deal Washington maintains it is under no obligation to move.

According to Oxfam, the just-enacted US farm bill will pay an estimated $1bn (€642m, £505m) a year in subsidies over the next five years to about 12,000 mostly large-scale cotton farmers. Peter Mandelson, European Union trade commissioner, said that without an agreement there was no chance the legislation would be changed.

The US made the size of any reductions in cotton subsidies contingent on China lowering trade barriers to its cotton exports, compounding the frustration of African producers who were left on the sidelines as the core group of seven trade heavyweights failed to resolve their differences.

Mr Sanou said he had been invited to Geneva to negotiate on cotton subsidies but in more than 10 days it had not been discussed.

Though Brazil is proceeding with $4bn in sanctions in retaliation for US cotton subsidies that have been judged illegal, the WTO’s lengthy dispute procedures offer African producers no hope of short-term relief.

Representatives of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries with close ties to the EU were also despondent over the collapse of a deal on bananas between the EU and Latin American producers that would have ended 16 years of litigation in the WTO.

Under the agreement the EU would have cut its tariff on Latin American bananas from €176 to €114 per tonne by 2016.

Though ACP countries were unhappy about the impact on their preferential access to the European banana market, they were in the process of negotiating an assistance package with the EU that would have compensated them for loss of trade.

In the absence of a deal, Ecuador is threatening further action at the WTO against the EU’s banana import regime, leaving ACP producers in an uncertain legal limbo.

The least-developed countries were also hoping to negotiate on a two-year-old pledge by rich nations to grant duty-free and quota-free access to their markets for 97 per cent of the products they export. This too has come to nothing.

African ministers have not lost hope that the talks can be revived. “The Doha talks should be relaunched at the earliest opportunity,” said Popane Lebesa, trade minister of Lesotho, which speaks for LDCs in the WTO. Mr Kenyatta also appealed for the talks “to pick up from where they left off”.

The Geneva headquarters of the World Trade Organisation on Wednesday had the air of the morning after a party that had started well but ended in tears. Nine days of continual negotiations left the participants with metaphorical hang­overs but, for once, little rancour.

The ministers departed for their respective constituencies all pledging that this would not be the end of the Doha round. But adding to the end-of-term atmosphere was the fact that for several leading players it was probably the end of their substantive involvement.

Peter Mandelson, the Euro­­pean Union trade commissioner, said the outline deal that ministers were striving for this week would certainly not happen by the end of the year and “not for the foreseeable future”. Unless his term as commissioner is renewed next year, which will depend largely on domestic politics in the UK, it will be someone else who gets to sign it.

Pascal Lamy, the WTO’s director-general, has to decide by the end of the year whether he wants to seek another four-year term in office. The betting among participants was that four years battering his head against a wall would probably be enough for him, though he remained enigmatic on the subject.

As for the round – and the WTO – itself, there was much musing that perhaps a simpler, piecemeal approach to trade agreements would be helpful. On Monday night Mr Lamy referred to Doha as a “cathedral”, whose curlicues of complexity rendered it magnificent but difficult to complete. On Wednesday he built on the analogy: “First you have the vague idea for a cathedral, then plans for the cathedral, then you have to start adding chapels everywhere,” he said. “The fundamental reality is that it has become too complex.”

The mantra of multilateral negotiations reaching across several strands – manufacturing, services, agriculture, legal trade rules, intellectual property rights – is that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. For the past six and a half years only the first half of that sentence has been true.

Susan Schwab, the US trade representative, will also most likely be departing office with President George W. Bush at the end of the year. She told the Financial Times on Wednesday: “It may be that this grand-scale agreements format that we have been operating under since 1947 is obsolete”, a description she quickly amended to “needs to be reviewed”.

“If you step back and reflect a little bit and think about the pieces that are doable that are either complete or could be completed and where there are internal trade-offs, [you could] start that ball rolling,” Ms Schwab said.

But both Mr Lamy and Ms Schwab said that any more disparate approach would have to wait until after the Doha round was done, and that they had not given up on it yet. Indeed, the mood on Wednesday was more deflated than angry or despairing. No one was prepared to declare the round dead. Though the ministerial party ended in tears, at least it avoided finishing in a fist-fight.

Kamal Nath, the Indian trade minister whose dispute with the US led to the meeting’s failure, wrapped up proceedings on Wednesday with one of his showman’s press conferences, which combine in various quantities trade wonkery, impassioned arias on behalf of the world’s poor and mischievous humour. His parting shot was to reveal that he had just asked Ms Schwab out for lunch.

“Yesterday in the Green Room [the inner negotiating group] Susan Schwab said that she loved me, and I said I loved her too,” Mr Nath said. “But probably she didn’t love me enough.”

Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, is visibly tired. But, he admits: “Sometimes frustration is worse than tiredness. And I cannot help but feel very frustrated.”

Mr Amorim has just returned from Geneva and the collapse of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha negotiating round, which ended last week after seven years of exhaustive and at times acrimonious negotiations.

The failure of the talks, Mr Amorim says, will have dire consequences, including the death of more people from starvation and the destabilising of more governments by runaway inflation.

Such dangers are more likely to affect poor countries than the rich nations – especially in the US and Europe – whose farm subsidies and import tariffs Mr Amorim and his colleagues from the G20 group of developing nations had hoped the Doha round would dismantle.

So it is especially frustrating for Mr Amorim that the collapse of the talks was caused by India’s refusal to give ground on measures to protect its non-farm sectors and by unwillingness by China and even Argentina, Brazil’s main partner in the Mercosur customs union, to join Brazil in making similar concessions in the name of a multilateral agreement.

“Perhaps some of those leaders, evaluating what it means not having the round, and making some mutual concessions, could still decide that it would be useful and try to finalise the talks. But that is a very Panglossian idea.”

Much more likely, he says, is “a real fragmentation of world trade”, with more bilateral agreements, more dispute settlement procedures at the WTO and, especially, more protectionism.

The Doha talks stumbled several times. A ministerial meeting in Cancún, Mexico, in 2003 brought it close to collapse and Brazil was widely blamed by the US and others for leading a group of “nay-sayers” in the G20.

Since then, however, Mr Amorim and his team have taken the lead in building consensus among developing nations that, before the final collapse last week, offered a chance of bringing the talks close to a successful conclusion.

Brazil, for example, came close to an agreement with the European Union that would have given access to the EU’s ethanol market in exchange for concessions on Brazilian barriers to manufactured goods that Brazil’s private sector showed a willingness to accept.

“Our proposals were already being seen two or three years ago as marking out the middle ground,” Mr Amorim says. “We invented the formula for market access in agriculture, we invented almost everything in the agricultural area. And we were willing to make leaps in the dark.”

One immediate consequence of the collapse is that Brazil will take action against the US on subsidies to cotton producers and on import tariffs charged on Brazilian ethanol.

In the medium term, Brazil, as part of the Mercosur customs union, will seek bilateral agreements with the US, EU and others.

But Brazil’s ability to lead Mercosur will have been damaged by what many in Argentina saw as its betrayal of its partners in Geneva by its willingness to make concessions on manufactured imports.

Mr Amorim says such disagreements are not as severe as they may seem. But Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, who was due to meet President Cristina Fernández of Argentina in Buenos Aires on Sunday night, may have a hard time settling the two countries’ differences.

The longer-term outlook, Mr Amorim says, is bleak.

“It’s not that world peace is at risk. The world today is different from the 1930s. But many countries will be destabilised.”

What can be done? “We will reinitiate negotiations with the EU and we will have to start other talks. [On Friday] I had the trade minister of Indonesia here talking about Asia and Mercosur and how we can progress.

“These things all have merits. But in relation to the Doha round they are all second best because they are not dealing with the main distortion to world trade, which is subsidies.”

Celso Amorim, Brazil's foreign minister, is visibly tired. But, he admits: "Sometimes frustration is worse than tiredness. And I cannot help but feel very frustrated."

Mr Amorim has just returned from Geneva and the collapse of the World Trade Organisation's Doha negotiating round, which ended last week after seven years of exhaustive and at times acrimonious negotiations.

The failure of the talks, Mr Amorim says, will have dire consequences, including the death of more people from starvation and the destabilising of more governments by runaway inflation.

Such dangers are more likely to affect poor countries than the rich nations - especially in the US and Europe - whose farm subsidies and import tariffs Mr Amorim and his colleagues from the G20 group of developing nations had hoped the Doha round would dismantle.

So it is especially frustrating for Mr Amorim that the collapse of the talks was caused by India's refusal to give ground on measures to protect its non-farm sectors and by unwillingness by China and even Argentina, Brazil's main partner in the Mercosur customs union, to join Brazil in making similar concessions in the name of a multilateral agreement.

"Perhaps some of those leaders, evaluating what it means not having the round, and making some mutual concessions, could still decide that it would be useful and try to finalise the talks. But that is a very Panglossian idea."

Much more likely, he says, is "a real fragmentation of world trade", with more bilateral agreements, more dispute settlement procedures at the WTO and, especially, more protectionism.

The Doha talks stumbled several times. A ministerial meeting in Cancún, Mexico, in 2003 brought it close to collapse and Brazil was blamed by the US and others for leading a group of "nay-sayers" in the G20.

Since then, however, Mr Amorim and his team have taken the lead in building consensus among developing nations that offered a chance of bringing the talks close to a successful conclusion.

Brazil, for example, came close to an agreement with the European Union that would have given access to the EU's ethanol market in exchange for concessions on Brazilian barriers to manufactured goods that Brazil's private sector seemed willing to accept.

"Our proposals were already being seen two or three years ago as marking out the middle ground," Mr Amorim says. "We invented the formula for market access in agriculture, we invented almost everything in the agricultural area. And we were willing to make leaps in the dark."

One immediate consequence of the collapse is that Brazil will take action against the US on subsidies to cotton producers and on import tariffs on Brazilian ethanol.

In the medium term, Brazil, as part of the Mercosur customs union, will seek bilateral agreements with the US, EU and others.

But Brazil's ability to lead Mercosur will have been damaged by what many in Argentina saw as its betrayal of its partners in Geneva by its willingness to make concessions on manufactured imports.

Mr Amorim says such disagreements are not as severe as they may seem. But Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, who was due to meet President Cristina Fernández of Argentina in Buenos Aires last night, may have a hard time settling their differences.

The longer-term outlook, Mr Amorim says, is bleak.

"It's not that world peace is at risk. The world today is different from the 1930s. But many countries will be destabilised."

What can be done? "We will reinitiate negotiations with the EU and we will have to start other talks. [On Friday] I had the trade minister of Indonesia here talking about Asia and Mercosur and how we can progress.

"These things all have merits. But in relation to the Doha round they are all second best because they are not dealing with the main distortion to world trade, which is subsidies."

It is August, and you may be paying less attention to the global trading system than to fly-fishing in Alaska, trekking in Bhutan or appreciating the wines of southern France. Yet spare a thought for the World Trade Organisation, which a few short months from now will almostcertainly be in crisis.

From December 12-18, the WTO will hold its sixth ministerial conference in Hong Kong. Its aim will be to clear the last hurdles to complete the so-called "Doha development round" that began in 2001. Yet the chances of doing so look increasingly slim. On July 31, trade officials meeting in Geneva missed a deadline for delivering a "first approximation" of an agreement, leaving just three months after August to reach a deal. John Tsang, Hong Kong's secretary for commerce, industry and technology, the special administrative region's trade sherpa and host for the meeting, is drafting a "Hong Kong declaration" to be signed in mid-November by trade ministers. This, he argues, will provide momentum for the December meeting even if it contains unresolved issues. But even Mr Tsang admits that time is running short to deliver a "good quality" declaration.

What would happen if the Doha round failed? Cynics might argue, not much. The original focus of the WTO was to break down tariff walls created during the 1930s. The WTO and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, did such a good job reducing tariffs that with few exceptions they no longer constitute a big impediment. The main new addition, a dispute settlement court, is functioning smoothly, and failure of the Doha round would have little impact on its deliberations. WTO rules allow member countries to form customs areas and free trade agreements as long as they are not exclusionary. The trend since the WTO was created in 1995 has been the rapid growth of FTAs. Some of their backers say the WTO is too slow to serve business's needs.

But let us ask a larger question - what if the WTO degraded into a bureaucracy without the momentum of its negotiating rounds? Because, if the Doha round fizzles, it will be next to impossible to launch new negotiations. If the WTO lacks the ability to address new issues as trade evolves, even more governments will pursue bilateral deals, which may be good for local producers but are notoriously bad for international business. The proliferation of bilateral deals has created a spaghetti bowl of rules and regulations that are a headache. What is worse, the principle at the heart of WTO will suffer - to mediate the interests of the many, not just a few.

This is also the principle behind the Doha round, which aimed to redress a perceived imbalance in rules favouring rich countries over poor ones. It was designed to answer, in part, the critique of the anti-globalisation protesters who shut down WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999 and have set the tone for each ministerial meeting since then. The Doha development round, launched in 2001, was framed around three broad issues: market access, competition and services. Instead of dealing with these, negotiations are bogged down on the issue of agricultural subsidies of developed nations.

If officials walk away from Hong Kong without at least the semblance of a package deal, or worse, a collapse such as happened in Cancún in 2003, the risk of failure goes up exponentially. The larger context is that the US administration will lose its fast-track negotiating authority in 2007, which will mean that the WTO's most forceful advocate historically will be tied up in domestic issues when new developments occur on the negotiating front. So the Doha round must meet its schedule of finishing by 2006.

The crisis in Hong Kong will be inside the meeting, not on the streets. In July, trade officials missed a self-imposed deadline to agree concessions from developed countries on agricultural subsidies balanced by concessions from developing countries on market access. The deadline had been set in July 2004 when officials did make some progress. A year later, negotiations on agricultural subsidies have advanced only marginally while equally important talks, including market access and services, have languished. The way the negotiations have been designed means the Doha deal has to be comprehensive or not at all. The rules do not permit, for example, a deal on agricultural subsidies without companion agreements on market access and export competition. So it seems increasingly unlikely that officials will be able to break the deadlock.

So, when 6,000 senior government officials, 3,000 journalists and 2,000 registered members of non-governmental organisations converge on Hong Kong in December, who will be there to advocate the principles of free trade and investment? Global business needs to remind governments how important it is for the Doha round to succeed. Business can provide solutions by creating employment and providing alternatives to protected sectors. Business should at least serve as a counterweight to the voice of those who claim the WTO harms the environment, labour and poor countries. August is a good time for relaxing, but this is no time to be relaxed about the future of the WTO.

The writer is chairman of the Pacific Basin Economic Council and senior adviser at PwC

China’s commerce ministry on Tuesday reacted in unusually mild fashion to a World Trade Organisation action brought by the European Union and US over Beijing’s regulation of financial news and information.

Washington and Brussels this week began WTO proceedings over 2006 rules that effectively put the Chinese financial information businesses of international news providers under the control of local rival and regulator, Xinhua news agency.

In its response to the EU and US requests for consultation, the first step of a formal complaint, the commerce ministry said China would look into the issue and handle it according to WTO dispute resolution procedures.

“As a WTO member, China respects other members’ choices,” the ministry said in a statement. Officials declined to comment further.

The statement’s conciliatory tone will fuel hopes that a deal can be reached on the Xinhua rules, which have not been enforced but are seen by international news agencies such as Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones as a potential threat to their China operations.

Trade lawyers said the reaction appeared to be part of a continuing trend for Beijing to regard litigation in the WTO as part of the normal course of events rather than a challenge to its national sovereignty.

“Increasingly the Chinese are realising that the sky doesn’t fall in when they are taken to dispute settlement or even when they lose a case,” said one Geneva-based trade lawyer.

The commerce ministry has responded to past WTO actions on other issues by the EU and US with statements variously expressing “regret”, “bafflement” and “strong dissatisfaction”.

A deal on the Xinhua rules would prevent the dispute adding to mounting diplomatic strains caused by China’s huge trade surplus with the US and EU and allegations that Beijing manipulates the renminbi exchange.

Liu Binjie, head of the General Administration of Press and Publications (Gapp), said officials were considering the possibility of ending Xinhua’s role overseeing its foreign counterparts in China.

“The issue is being discussed at home and abroad. We will seriously listen to opinions from all sides,” Reuters quoted Mr Liu as saying.

Xinhua declined to comment and it is unclear how willing the agency, the government’s main propaganda organ and an influential institution in its own right, might be to soften its 2006 regulations. The rules bar foreign agencies that sell financial news and information to non-media customers in China from direct contact with their clients, requiring them to work through an arm of Xinhua instead.

Xinhua officials have said the agency strictly separates its regulatory, commercial and propaganda functions, but the EU and US believe the rules breach China’s WTO commitment to liberalised financial information services.

Additional reporting by Alan Beattie in London

As news of the collapse of the Doha round talks rippled across Washington on Tuesday afternoon, there was a rare moment of partisan unity on US trade policy.

Republicans and Democrats, who have been feuding over the passage of bilateral trade agreements with Colombia and South Korea this year, both agreed that China and India were to blame for the failure of the talks and that US negotiators were right to make no further concessions.

"No deal is better than a bad deal," said Chuck Grassley, the Iowa senator and senior Republican on the Senate finance committee, which has jurisdiction over trade. "If India, China and other advanced developing countries want the benefits of expanded trade, they have to abandon protectionism and negotiate in good faith," Mr Grassley added.

The question now is whet-her India and China may face a US congressional backlash, with critics of further trade liberalisation hardening their views and supporters of closer ties feeling disappointed.

Efforts by lawmakers to press ahead with legislation designed to prevent alleged Chinese currency manipulation, which have stalled as the renminbi has appreciated, could gather momentum if politicians from both sides of the aisle feel more strongly that China is not doing its part in opening up its markets to the US.

A second area that could face additional scrutiny is India's participation in the US preference programme, which expires at the end of this year and gives certain developing countries duty-free access to US markets. On Tuesday the House app-roved a one-year extension to the programme for all participants, but Charlie Rangel, the Democratic chairman of the ways and means committee, warned of "broad interest to re-examine the functioning of this programme, including in light of the events of this week and differences in levels of economic development".

Another summer, another failed ministerial meeting in the Doha round. Nine sweat-soaked days of late-night negotiations, rumours, tempers lost and regained – and an unusual surge of optimism halfway through – in the end came to nothing.

It was always a gamble for Pascal Lamy, the director-general of the World Trade Organisation, to call a meeting of ministers when big negotiating gaps remained. But Mr Lamy has to decide by December whether he wants another four-year term at the head of the WTO and might well have thought it worth one last throw of the dice.

The first week began with modest hopes. In public, ministers backed Mr Lamy’s view that the chances of ­success were better than even. Privately, few officials put it higher than 30 per cent.

Events soon fell into a ­pattern: a meeting of the wider WTO membership in the morning, then gatherings of a smaller group of 30 to 35 ministers in the “green room” process – named after a green-painted room used in earlier years for convening small groups of negotiators.

The US created some momentum last Tuesday by proposing to reduce its allowable ceiling for farm subsidies to $15bn (€9.6bn, £7.5bn). The figure was a couple of billion dollars below Washington’s previous offer and much less than existing limits of $48bn, though – as Brazil and India promptly pointed out – about twice its current actual spending.

But the atmosphere turned difficult on Wednesday morning after the arrival of Kamal Nath, the Indian trade minister, who had been in New Delhi helping his government survive a parliamentary confidence vote.

Mr Nath, who has in the past ended meetings he felt were not going well, played bad cop and good cop, first giving a swashbuckling speech calling rich countries “self-righteous” and saying he would not negotiate away small farmers’ interests, then striking a more emollient tone for the press.

The talks started to get stuck on a handful of difficult issues: developing countries wanting to protect vulnerable smallholder farmers and exclude whole industrial sectors from across-the-board tariff cuts. A smaller group of seven core negotiating partners – the European Union, the US, Brazil, India, Australia, Japan and China – met until 3am on Wednesday night without making much progress.

At this point the negotiations appeared on the point of failure. The EU delegation had brought forward their flights out of Geneva. On Thursday itself the talks came so close to breakdown that Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU agriculture commissioner, had written and printed out speaking points in preparation for commenting on the collapse.

Instead, after the tireless Mr Lamy had started to circulate potential compromises, the talks pulled back from the brink. A phone call between Mr Nath and Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, was also credited with softening India’s tone. A draft agreement circulated on Friday was accepted – grudgingly in some cases, such as Argentina, which wanted more protection for its manufacturers – as the basis for negotiation.

After a successful informal session of talks on services over the weekend, the unlikely prospect of a deal increased in probability.

But it turned out that an agreement to negotiate was no more than that, and the argument revived again in a familiar pattern.

The US, with covering fire from some developing world agricultural exporters such as Uruguay, insisted that India and China open their rice and cotton markets; India and China, backed by other heavy hitters such as Indonesia, said that the US was asking them to sacrifice too much.

The talks took an agonising two further days to finally come to an end, with no country apparently wanting to deliver the death blow lest it was accused of murder. But eventually Mr Lamy admitted that his gamble had not come off, and the six-year-old round lapsed back into limbo.

Heated public disagreements broke out yesterday between the main camps in the Doha round of trade talks, as negotiations stalled over measures permitting developing countries to protect farmers from rising imports.

Speaking after 12 hours of inconclusive talks between the main trading nations, Keith Rockwell, World Trade Organisation spokesman, said: "The situation is very tense, things are finely -balanced and the outcome is by no means certain."

Open disputes pitting the US against China and India, and renewed sniping from Paris at Peter Mandelson, European Union trade commissioner, had soured the mood after broad acceptance of an outline deal on Friday.

The US yesterday repeated its warning that India and China were risking the collapse of the ministerial meeting by continuing to insist on special protection to shield farmers from international competition.

Susan Schwab, US trade representative, said earlier: "There is a real threat to the delicate balance that we achieved on Friday night and I'm very concerned that it will jeopardise the outcome of this round."

Meanwhile, the French government had declared that the deal being discussed was not acceptable and said 11 of 27 EU member states shared its reservations.

President Nicolas Sarkozy is unhappy that China and other emerging markets are not committed to liberalising entire industrial sectors, and is frustrated at a lack of progress in extending legal protection to geographical names for foods such as Parma ham.

Mr Mandelson said that talks at the meeting, which yesterday entered their eighth day, were at a "difficult and complicated" stage but that the will to succeed remained. Officials said that while the divisions were serious, it was unclear whether the disputes were simply last-minute jockeying ahead of a final deal.

"A trade deal just about to break down looks much the same from the outside as one about to succeed," one trade diplomat said.

Pascal Lamy, the World Trade Organisation director-general, last night postponed the issue of an updated -version of the draft agreement he had circulated on Friday, which ministers had agreed to use as a basis for discussion.

India had said it still did not agree with some of the detail, notably the terms of a mechanism allowing it to raise tariffs to protect vulnerable farmers in the face of a surge of agricultural imports.

On Sunday Mr Sarkozy, who has been at loggerheads with Mr Mandelson since France took over the presidency of the EU on July 1, demanded an immediate meeting with him.

Peter Power, Mr Mandelson's spokesman, said the commissioner would be happy to meet Mr Sarkozy but that his negotiating commitments had to come first.

The core seven negotiating partners - Japan, Australia, Brazil, China, India, the US and the EU - had resumed their meeting last night after breaking to consult their capitals.

Influential interests clash head-on

The heat of yesterday's spats over the Doha talks was generated by some of the most influential interests clashing head-on.

Millions of farmers and manufacturers who form powerful interest groups have weighed on the decisions of the ministers struggling to hammer out common ground on trade in -agriculture and industrial goods.

In the US, the agricultural lobby is wary of backing the $14.4bn (£12.2bn) ceiling on farm payouts that US negotiators have floated without gaining new access to export markets in return.

In particular, cotton farmers, whose lavish subsidies are under scrutiny in Doha, want to be able to sell more to China. Beijing's refusal to give guarantees that it will open its cotton market thus strikes directly at one of the most sensitive areas of the US's negotiating interests.

Meanwhile, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, is conducting a war of attrition against the concessions on farm support offered by Peter Mandelson, European trade commissioner.

The Doha round of global trade talks, now in its seventh year, broke up without agreement yesterday after nine days of tense negotiations.

Divisions between the US, India and China about access to the agricultural markets of the developing world could not be overcome and the talks ground to a halt, scuppering efforts by Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organisation, to broker a compromise.

The failure of the talks marks the third summer in a row that ministers have left a high-profile summit empty-handed. Several ministers and officials admitted that any substantive progress would now have to wait until a new US president was in the White House.

The breakdown followed marathon negotiating sessions among ministers from the world's leading economies, with the talks running on long after their original schedule. Tempers occasionally flared during the meetings, with the US and China accusing each other of not making enough concessions.

Yet, in the immediate aftermath, there was relatively little trading of blame.

Susan Schwab, US trade representative, said the US remained committed to the Doha round, which was launched in 2001. "This is not a time to talk about collapse," she said. "The US commitments remain on the table."

Peter Mandelson, EU trade commissioner, said: "I realise that you will ask who is to blame for this failure. The answer of course is that it is a collective failure." But Mr Mandelson said the agriculture talks had been harmed by the five-year programme of subsidies passed by the US Congress, which was "one of the most reactionary farm bills in the history of the US".

The meetings, which nearly broke down at the end of last week, got a fresh lease of life when a draft agreement circulated by Mr Lamy was accepted as the basis for more negotiations. But renewed tensions between China, India and the US proved insurmountable.

Mr Lamy defended his decision to call a meeting of ministers when negotiating gaps remained. "None of the ministers to whom I have put this question told me I should not have done it," he said.

Several ministers said the issue on which the talks had foundered - a mechanism allowing countries such as India and China to protect farmers from imports - was a relatively small part of the talks, and that there had been progress in other issues .

However, they admitted that it was unclear whether those gains could be preserved and picked up again at a later date.

Reports and analysis, Page 4

中国 > 经济 > 新闻   多哈回合贸易谈判爆发争执   英国《金融时报》艾伦•贝蒂(Alan Beattie)、弗朗西斯·威廉姆斯(Frances Williams)日内瓦报道 2008年7月29日 星期二

昨日，多哈回合贸易谈判的主要谈判国之间出现激烈的公开争执。此前，谈判各方正在努力维持周末期间出人意料的进展势头。 美国、中国和印度之间的公开争执，给上周五各方接受一份纲要协议后产生的乐观情绪泼了冷水。 欧盟贸易专员彼得·曼德尔森(Peter Mandelson)昨日表示，在日内瓦进行的谈判正处于一个“困难而又复杂”的阶段，但取得成功的意愿仍在。官员们表示，分歧是严重的，但不清楚上述分歧是否仅是在最后关头的谈判造势。 美国加重了其警告的语气，称印度和中国坚持对农民加以特别保护，使其免受国际竞争，这种立场有导致谈崩的危险。美国贸易代表苏珊·施瓦布(Susan Schwab)表示：“我们在上周五晚间达成的微妙平衡，正面临真正的威胁，我很担心这将危及谈判结局。” 印度表示，仍不同意某些细节，尤其是一项涉及提高关税，保护农民的机制的条款。中国指责美国虚伪，称美国一方面要求中国开放棉花市场，另一方面又不保证大幅削减其对本国棉农的补贴。 与曼德尔森意见不合的欧盟轮值主席国法国表示，该协议不可接受。 七大核心谈判方，即日本、澳大利亚、巴西、中国、印度、美国和欧盟，在休会与各自政府磋商后，昨晚重新投入谈判。多名部长级官员曾经警告，当前这一轮部长级会议将是至少一年内取得进展的最后机会。 译者/和风

欧洲 > 经济 > 新闻   世贸组织将在七月底召开部长级会议   英国《金融时报》艾伦•贝蒂(Alan Beattie)伦敦报道 2008年6月26日 星期四

世界贸易组织(WTO)负责人召集各国部长于7月末举行会议，力图挽救陷入困境的多哈(Doha)回合贸易谈判，这将是一次高风险的尝试。 世贸组织总干事帕斯卡•拉米(Pascal Lamy)昨日通告驻日内瓦各国大使，将于7月21日召开部长会议。他表示，取得突破、成功完成谈判的机率在50%以上。 英国首相戈登•布朗(Gordon Brown)表示：“我相信这是贸易谈判的最后阶段……我认为，我们已经非常接近了。” 但一些贸易官员警告称，主要国家间在谈判方面仍存在巨大分歧，拉米决定召开会议是孤注一掷，可能导致引人瞩目的内部分歧。 布朗表示，如无法达成协议，“可能对世贸组织的未来造成潜在的破坏性打击”。 美国贸易代表苏珊•施瓦布(Susan Schwab)的一位发言人表示：“虽然近日来有一些进展，但在召开部长级会议前的几周内，仍有许多工作要做，在农业、工业品和服务方面仍存在重大分歧。” 欧盟委员会(European Commission)表示，其他国家必须与欧盟(EU)一样，在作出让步方面展现出同样的灵活性。 拉米呼吁在日内瓦世贸组织召开30至35个部长参加的会议，涵盖在谈判中有着不同利益的多个国家。 多哈回合谈判三年来未取得进展。2005年谈判陷入僵局，当年在香港举行的所有成员国都参加的会议也毫无成果；2006年谈判陷入混乱，欧盟和美国因未能就农业改革达成妥协而相互指责，其后谈判暂时中止。 译者/岱嵩

欧洲 > 经济 > 新闻   WTO calls meeting to break through trade talks impasse   By Alan Beattie in London Thursday, June 26, 2008

The head of the World Trade Organisation has called a meeting of ministers for late July in a high-risk attempt to rescue the beleaguered Doha round of global trade talks. Pascal Lamy, director- general of the WTO, yesterday told ambassadors in Geneva that ministers would meet on July 21 and the chances of a breakthrough that could successfully conclude the talks were higher than 50 per cent. Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, said: “I believe this is the endgame for the trade talks . . . I think we are in touching distance.” But some trade officials warned that large negotiating gaps remained between the leading countries and said Mr Lamy's decision to call a meeting was a gamble that could lead to a high- profile implosion. Mr Brown said that failure to conclude an agreement “could deal a potentially crippling blow to the future of the WTO”. A spokesman for Susan Schwab, the US trade representative, said: “While there has been progress in recent days, in the weeks leading up to the ministerial meeting there still is a lot of work and still important differences in agriculture, NAMA [industrial goods] and services.” The European Commission said other countries had to show the same flexibility in making concessions as had the European Union. Mr Lamy called for a meeting of 30 to 35 ministers at the WTO in Geneva, representing a broad range of countries with different interests in the talks. The previous three summers have failed to push the talks forward. There was deadlock in 2005 ahead of an unproductive meeting of the full WTO membership in Hong Kong that year, and negotiations were suspended after they collapsed in disarray in 2006, with the EU and US blaming each other for failing to compromise on agricultural reform.

国际 > 经济 > 评论   拉米该如何挽救多哈回合？   作者：格兰特•阿尔杜那斯(Grant Aldonas)为英国《金融时报》撰稿 2007年7月19日 星期四

一 年前的这个月，世界贸易组织(WTO)的谈判代表驶入了一个死胡同。一年后，在德国波茨坦，他们不是决定将车头掉转，另寻它路到达其目的地，而是加大油门，冲进了他们邻居的房屋。 世贸组织总干事帕斯卡•拉米(Pascal Lamy)，与来自美国、欧盟(EU)和发展中世界的主要谈判代表，将如何走出这一“车祸现场”，重新发动这辆汽车呢？答案并不是发布一份“拉米草案”，以6年来毫无成果的谈判为基础，提供这位世贸组织总干事有关如何达成协议的真知灼见。 答案在于为多哈发展议程创建一个新的结构，以便在贸易方面产生切实成果，对最欠发达的国家提供实在的帮助，并为进一步的自由化提供一个重要的激励机制。为朝着这一目标努力，我建议拉米应该尽力游说尽可能多的成员国，首先从美国和欧盟开始，支持下文包含四个部分的协议。 第一部分，涉及在所有愿意在全球基础上直接向自由贸易迈进的世贸组织成员国之间，达成一个“诸边”贸易协议。为参与其中，成员国将必须消除在商品和服务方面（包括农业）的所有贸易壁垒，并立即削减生产中的农业补贴。此举将在世贸组织内部建立一个自由贸易核心，为参与者提供显著的贸易利益，从而使全面协议从根本上更容易被批准，并向未参与的世贸组织成员国提供重要的激励机制，以使它们在准备好接受这些义务时能够尽早加入。 此类协议还将使那些愿意朝着自由贸易努力的国家，得以处理一些诸如投资、竞争政策和某些最低劳动标准（例如，对奴隶或强制劳工生产商品的禁令）等其它方面的棘手问题。这还对消除“意大利面碗”现象产生积极作用——即参与者之间达成的双边或地区自由贸易协议造成重叠。 一个新的多哈发展议程的第二部分，将涉及被普遍描述为“缩水的多哈”(Doha Lite)的方案。“缩水的多哈”是一份包括所有世贸组织成员国的协议，它以相对有限的形式（即这一方案要求进一步削减增加的关税，使发展中国家可以接受），锁定各成员国迄今在多哈回合谈判中做出的承诺。该协议不会要求美国和欧洲必须在农业方面做出更多让步——农业方面的进一步自由化，将留给那些希望全面朝着自由贸易迈进的国家。 这一新举措的第三部分，将涉及协调和扩大全球最欠发达国家的贸易优惠措施。 当前的贸易优惠计划，例如美国普惠制(US Generalised System of Preferences)等，包含许多限制其作用的条件。此外，在美国、欧盟及其它国家的贸易优惠计划之间，存在大量相互冲突的规定，从而可能抹杀这些优惠措施的协调性。新举措的作用将是，为最欠发达的国家提供真正的规模经济——如果它们能在希腊的雅典销售商品，那么根据相同的规则，它们也能在美国佐治亚州的雅典销售商品。 如果仅限于世界上最欠发达的国家而言，协调贸易优惠措施，还将产生一个农业方面的协议，该协议强调了最欠发达国家的需求，同时不会将此类协议的益处扩大至更广泛的新兴市场和中等收入的发展中国家，除非和直到这些国家本身愿意参与进一步的贸易自由化。换言之，协调和扩大贸易优惠计划，可能消除富裕世界针对贫穷国家农产品的壁垒，并以其它方式提供帮助，抵消富裕世界补贴所产生的任何持续影响。 这一举措的第四部分，包括迅速消除贸易和商品及服务投资方面的壁垒，这些投资有助于提高能源效率，并减少二氧化碳排放。它还将包括减少任何金融服务贸易方面的壁垒，这些壁垒将抑制全球碳市场的发展。 此类协议将创造新的市场机遇，并在整个发展中世界传播环保技术。然而，其主要的吸引力，是表明贸易自由化与环保行为是一致的，并且能帮助处理全球问题。 我预计，拉米在游说世贸组织成员国时将会发现，美国、欧洲、加拿大、墨西哥、澳大利亚、智利、新西兰、新加坡以及许多其它国家会希望迅速推进自由贸易。巴基斯坦和印度尼西亚等其它重要的发展中国家可能也会加入进来，主要是为了应对地区内更大的竞争对手：中国和印度。 我预计，所有世贸组织成员国将发现，协议中的一些内容符合它们当前的政治需求，无论它们支持自由化抑或倾向维持现状。然而，此类协议将产生远比当前多哈承诺更大程度的自由化，特别是对最欠发达的国家有益。 简言之，这是一份带有深远发展利益的“双赢”协议。难道这不应该包含在多哈发展议程中吗？ 本文作者是战略与国际研究中心(Center for Strategic and International Studies)威廉•M. •肖勒(William M. Scholl)国际商务主讲教师。他在2001年至2005年间担任美国商务部负责国际贸易的副部长。 译者/何黎