Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that hell is other people, and after six days at the trade talks in Hong Kong you could see his point.
Were Sartre writing Huis Clos (No Exit) today, he would probably set it at a WTO ministerial meeting, with negotiators snapping and snarling at each other, day after day, but making no apparent advance.
As a French intellectual, WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy knows a thing or two about Sartre. For Lamy, the fact that his members are still talking meant Hong Kong was a success -- of sorts.
He was terrified that the meeting would be another Seattle or Cancun, and it wasn't. But in all other respects, the meeting was a failure.
The notion that Hong Kong would be a staging post to an all-but-final deal by the end of April looks far-fetched after the trench warfare of the past week. None of the big issues -- agriculture, industrial tariffs or services -- was advanced, and the so-called package of special help for developing countries proved to be an exercise in cynicism by the developed world.
Take the agreement to allow the very poorest countries to export their products to the West, duty free and quota free. The EU pushed this very hard, perhaps because it already has such a program up and running under the Everything But Arms deal. Although the least-developed countries (LDCs) account for a tiny fraction of world trade, the US and Japan insisted that duty- and quota-free could not apply to all products. As Adriano Soares of Action Aid put it, this means that Bangladesh will be able to export all its non-existent nuclear submarines to the US, but not the textiles that make up more than 80 percent of what it exports.
The deal for LDCs was supposed to be an early Hong Kong harvest -- a sign of goodwill from the West to set a positive tone for the rest of the talks. No such galvanization took place. All that the endless wrangling achieved was to expose the hollowness of the notion that the talks launched in Doha four years ago constitute a development round.
The whole point about the concept of a development round was to redress the legitimate grievances of developing countries following the end of the last batch of negotiations between 1986 and 1993. The Uruguay Round was so biased in favour of the EU and the US that poorer countries vowed they would not sign up to a new set of liberalization talks unless their interests were given special attention. In particular, they demanded real cuts in the protection granted by Brussels and Washington to their farmers.
It became clear in Hong Kong that any notion of a "round for free" for developing states was not remotely on the table. The Americans offered four cotton-producing west African nations a minor concession -- an end to export subsidies -- but were less forthcoming about the vastly more significant handouts that Washington gives to southern US farmers when the world price falls.
Peter Mandelson, Europe's trade commissioner, was refreshingly frank about his mercantilist approach. It would be politically untenable, he said, for Brussels to give way on agriculture without getting something in return. The whole point about a negotiation was give and take. Brazil, India and some of the other bigger developing countries could not expect to gain access to the EU market unless they were prepared to concede ground on industrial goods and services.
With the French and Irish determined to defend European farmers' interests, Mandelson's negotiating approach was, perhaps, understandable. But so was the argument of Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, who said that developing nations were being told to pay Europe for something it was supposed to do anyway.
The EU also sought to drive a wedge through the developing world by seeking to differentiate between countries that were really poor and those that were not. In other words, Brussels had no demands of Benin, but it was not prepared to give a free ride to Brazil.
But as the campaigning World Development Movement pointed out, even "advanced" developing countries have problems of poverty and inequality that would be inconceivable in Europe, and so to brand them as quasi-developed is a nonsense. In India, for example, 80 percent of people live on less than US$2 a day.
Developing countries certainly don't share all the same economic interests, but one feature of Hong Kong was the willingness of the non-developed world to band together in the G110 -- comprising all WTO member states apart from the advanced countries of Europe, North America and Japan. While Washington and Brussels would love meetings to be conducted in the old manner -- carving up a deal between them and foisting it on everyone else -- the reality is that the WTO's dynamics have changed.
The new political reality will become evident if British Prime Minister Tony Blair manages to convene his special trade summit in the new year, which would include the leading wealthy and developing states. The feeling in Downing Street is that trade is now too big an issue to be left to trade ministers, and that if the Doha round is to get anywhere, people with a more strategic perspective must be involved.
As one official put it, there is a case for saying that it would be in the interests of the West's counter-terrorism and immigration policies to be more generous to poor countries, but that sort of trade-off is not one that is recognized by negotiators at WTO meetings.
Blair has two reasons for seeking a reinvigoration of the talks in the new year. He is disappointed that Britain's twin presidencies of the G8 and the EU have ended on such a discordant note. More importantly, however, the expiry in mid-2007 of the US fast-track mandate -- under which trade bills are presented to Congress on a take-it-or-leave-it basis -- means there is real pressure to get a move on. With protectionist sentiment rising there, a renewal of the fast-track looks unlikely, and any further delay on global trade talks would allow a bill to be picked apart on Capitol Hill.
It is hard, however, to envisage this round of talks being completed early next year, even assuming that a special summit can be convened. It is clear that the WTO is a dysfunctional organization and, unless its 150 members are happy to settle for the lowest common denominator, it will take years to complete this round. It should then be the last.
Donald Johnston, the secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, made one of the more useful contributions to Hong Kong when he said countries may need to abandon the mercantilist thinking of "I'll only give you this if you give me that," and recognize that the interests of everybody may be advanced by individual states being brave enough to go it alone.
But that's for the future. Meanwhile, the unfinished business from Hong Kong means we could be in for a sequel in the spring. As Sartre might have said: "Merde!"
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