Diplomats have pledged to make changes. Negotiators have promised to work together. Ministers have embarked on a hectic series of meetings.
But with time running out for the WTO to wrap up its current round of trade liberalization talks successfully, there is still little sign that the major players are giving the necessary ground to get things moving.
The process has been at an impasse for months. The EU and other rich countries are demanding greater concessions on industrial goods and services from developing countries like Brazil before they give ground on access to their own farm markets. But Brazil, India and others insist that Brussels must make the first move.
Observers say there's not enough time before a final year-end deadline to achieve the original ambition of slashing tariffs and subsidies, opening global markets to international trade flows and helping the world's poorest people -- even though WTO ministers say they have agreed on a series of bilateral talks that should enable them to make progress.
"We've already lost much of the ambition of the Doha round. It's not an ambitious round," said David Woods, director of the Geneva-based World Trade Agenda Consultants. "There is a generalized inability to make deals, to take political pain back home."
At last December's meeting in Hong Kong -- a key stage in the round of talks started in 2001 in the Qatari capital -- WTO members set a schedule to reach their target by the end of this year. The first major deadline is the end of April for agreeing on a formula for cutting tariffs and subsidies.
Members also insist that despite repeated delays -- including admitting that they would be unable to agree that formula at the Hong Kong meeting -- the ambition of the round shouldn't be reduced. Ministers are now holding a flurry of bilateral meetings to try to get the talks back on track.
But this doesn't necessarily reflect the real state of the talks, which are now so far behind schedule that WTO ministers are racing against time even to come up with a limited agreement, observers say.
"It is highly unlikely that the sort of detail that is needed will be agreed by April -- not just because there is a lot of it and it's technical -- but because the major players are still holding back, waiting for the other ones to move first," said Amy Barry, spokeswoman for aid agency Oxfam.
Part of the rush is that the 149 WTO members want to finish the substance of the agreement by the end of this year, so they can wrap up the loose ends before the expiration of "fast-track" authority in July next year. That authority means the US Congress must accept or reject international deals as a whole and cannot accept or reject specific measures.
After that, US trade ministers will have more problems pushing deals through, making it much more difficult to get the approval of the US, the world's biggest trading power.
"Trade negotiators are not likely to finalize a comprehensive trade round before the US fast-track authority expires," said Philippe de Pontet, an analyst at the Eurasia Group in Washington.
"Furthermore, the negotiating deadlines agreed to in Hong Kong may not be realistic, as the parties involved have not yet determined a framework, never mind the actual product-by-product negotiations on tariffs and subsidies," he said.
Many WTO members have blamed the impasse on EU intransigence on cutting import tariffs on farm goods, but analysts say this is far from the whole picture.
Although spats between the EU and the US have dominated the headlines -- most recently when a WTO panel supported Washington over EU restrictions on imports of genetically modified foods -- the problem may actually lie with major developing countries like Brazil and India, who are stalling on easing access to their markets while demanding greater concessions from their richer trading partners.
"At the end of the day, everybody has to give something to get something. The only exceptions are the least developed countries, quite reasonably so," Woods said.
"The rest of the developing world seems to think that they also have a right to do next to nothing, whilst developed countries open their markets. It's not going to happen, it never was," he said.
The world's poorest countries say the series of rows between the EU and US distracts attention from their needs.
"Sometimes we get very worried when we see the two elephants fighting. The elephants are the USA on one side, and the EU," said Love Mtesa, WTO ambassador for Zambia, which coordinates the group of least developed countries at the commerce body.
"We want them when they are talking to involve a third party -- that's the developing countries," Mtesa said.
If the Doha round fails to deliver, developing countries will focus on bilateral agreements, which are less difficult to conclude than a multilateral WTO deal but bring fewer economic benefits.
"Developing countries will increasingly turn their attention to bilateral and regional free trade agreements, many of which will focus on Asia," de Pontet said.
"This trend is already well under way, but it will accelerate in the face of Doha delays," he said.
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