A missed opportunity at the WTO

By Editorial staff Simon Wilson Jan 09, 2006

Hell is other people, as Jean Paul Sartre once said, and after six days at the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong, Pascal Lamy, the WTO’s director general, surely understands what he meant, said Larry Elliott in The Guardian.

The talking shop made no progress on any of the big issues, such as agriculture, industrial tariffs or services, “and the so-called package of special help for developing countries proved to be an exercise in cynicism by the developed world”.

Take the deal for ‘LDCs’ (least-developed countries), which was supposed to set a positive tone for the rest of the talks. This was designed to help the very poorest countries export their products to the West, duty- and quota-free, as part of sustainable development. The LDCs, after all, make up less than 1% of all world trade. But the US and Japan insisted that this could not apply to all products. So as Adriano Soares of Action Aid put it, Bangladesh can export as many of its non-existent nuclear submarines to the US as it wants, but not the textiles that make up 80% of its overseas sales.

It would have been “logical, though even more hellish for participants”, if the World Trade Organisation and the European Union had held their summits in the same place in the same time, said the FT, “for the core issue in both was agricultural protection”. But at least “a deal of sorts has at last been done”, said Gary Duncan in The Times. The “myopia” shown by Europe and the USA, however, is “all the more striking” given the rapidly evolving map of global power. Nations such as China, Russia, Brazil and India are growing fast, and will soon overtake the West. The weekend’s “fudged deal” in Hong Kong is “a missed opportunity to embrace a future we cannot avoid”.

Published in Economics | More articles by Simon Wilson

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