When trade titans and their feisty challengers clash on the shores of the Gulf this weekend, some lofty language will be ringing over the sands.
But behind the terminology -- implementation, TRIPS, anti-dumping, domestic support and countless other entries from the trade negotiator's wordbook -- the battle will be over real goods and the lives of countless millions of real people.
Drugs -- or how medicines can be got cheaply to AIDS sufferers in the world's poorest countries.
Grain -- or how far the EU will be ready to slash subsidies to its farmers and give Third World peasants a better shot at selling their own produce on global markets.
Steel -- or for how long its big producers and their workers in the US can continue to demand, and get, protection against low-priced imports from Brazil or Japan.
These are just three of the myriad issues that ministers from the 142 member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO) must tackle when they confer in Qatar's capital from next Friday to Tuesday.
The battle lines were effectively drawn up in a draft worked out in Geneva for a ministerial declaration at the end of the gathering that the big powers -- the EU, the US, Japan and Canada -- want to see launch a new "trade round."
The four, known as "The Quad," have wide support for this enterprise from virtually all other countries in the industrialised world -- the North.
Lined up on the other side are developing countries -- the South -- who feel the giants have for too long dictated the trade agenda and say they will talk, but on their own terms.
However, North and South have their internal differences -- some of nuance, some so radical as to spark accusations of "treachery" when voiced in the hearing of the other side.
Whether five days in Qatar will be enough to overcome the inter- and intra-bloc fissures -- and avoid the repetition of the last disaster to strike the six-year-old WTO when its 1999 Seattle ministerial conference collapsed in wrangling over an earlier round project -- is impossible to predict.
But the issues facing the WTO ministers, who are aware that another disaster could help push the global economy faster towards recession, are scarcely different two years later.
WTO Director-General Mike Moore told a Geneva news conference last Friday that the conference would need to make "very, very tough decisions on trade-offs" to achieve success.
The following are the key areas where these decisions will have to come:
The industrialized world wants a round to include full-scale negotiations on a further reduction of tariffs on manufactured goods to build on the average 36 percent cut agreed in the 1986 to 1993 Uruguay Round.
But the governments of many developing countries, who depend on customs duties for a large portion of their revenues, say a study of the impact on their economies of the earlier cuts must come first.
The South also wants any such talks to focus firmly on "tariff escalation" -- used by richer countries to ensure that the more poorer countries process their own raw materials before exporting them the larger the duties the resulting products will attract -- and on "tariff peaks" -- or unusually high duties on so-called sensitive products, like textiles and clothing, where cheaper products from developing countries can threaten industries in the North.
Developing countries, and a coalition of some with "Northern" farm produce exporters such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, want agreement to negotiate for the end of all farm subsidies, whether aimed at boosting production as in the EU or at increasing exports, more a US practice.
The EU -- firmly backed by Japan, Switzerland, Norway and South Korea who are all in a "subsidisers" camp -- says there can be no fixed timetable, although Brussels says it does not exclude some reductions if it can get concessions elsewhere.
Japan which -- like South Korea -- provides vast financial support to its rice farmers and places huge tariffs on the tiny amounts of foreign rice it allows in, is even less committal.
This is a term which covers dozens of problems developing countries have with either putting trade liberalization agreements reached in the Uruguay Round into practice in the time required, or with the way the North, especially the US and the EU, have implemented agreements, for example on textiles and clothing, that should have opened up their markets.
It has been one of the most controversial topics on the run-up to Doha. Developing countries say they want all or most of their problems solved at Doha. The big traders are ready to give way on some, but say negotiating on others must be part of a new round.
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