There was a flowering of metaphors at the lakeside headquarters of the WTO in Geneva last week. Sunday was meant to be the latest milestone on the road to recasting the rules of the global marketplace.
Instead, it has become another missed deadline, marking the failure of yet another attempt to kick-start the Doha round of trade talks -- and the players involved were forced to turn to poetic language to cheer themselves up.
"This is a dance," said Segfredo Serrano, from the Philippines. "We have to dance, and we have to have a partner. We come from countries with good dancers, but our toes are being stepped on by very clumsy partners."
Or, as trade analyst Christophe Bellman put it, using a phrase he picked up from African negotiators to describe the impact of the talks on the poorest countries, "when the elephants are fighting, the grass suffers. When the elephants are making love, the grass still suffers."
WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy had been pushing hard for negotiators to sketch the outlines of a deal ("modalities" in Geneva-speak) by Sunday, so that trade ministers could come together and discuss the details. But with developing countries still concerned that the elephants are trampling the grass, he was forced to accede to their demands and admit that the deadline would be missed.
While some were insisting that a few more weeks of hard graft in the Swiss city could roll the talks to their next stage, some observers have already started to question whether the round is about to "run into the sand" (an especially popular metaphor), and even whether the future of the WTO itself is at stake.
US President George W. Bush will have to reapply to Congress for his right to negotiate trade deals next summer and many analysts believe he is unlikely to get it. Without that authority, any deal would almost certainly be chucked out -- so unless the details can be pinned down before then, the whole trade round is in jeopardy.
Europe and the US' unwillingness to dismantle their lavish farm subsidies is often seen as the crux of the fraught negotiations, but the game at the WTO involves 150 players, arrayed in a dizzying constellation of overlapping groups. They are all hoping to protect their various interests and prevent signing away the livelihoods of their citizens, as many developing countries felt they had after the Uruguay round of trade talks which ended in 1994.
Poorer countries were promised that this time, in the Doha round (named after the Qatari capital where the talks were launched in 2001), levelling the playing field for the poor would be at the heart of the negotiations. Four-and-a-half years on, many fear that they are being sidelined, as Europe and the US spar with each other.
Promises
The poorest -- the least-developed countries -- have been promised they will not be forced to lower their own tariffs, and offered a share of an "aid for trade" package, which will help to pay for infrastructure.
But analysts say that means many rich countries feel they have ticked the "development" box, and can go on pushing their commercial interests in other areas, demanding better access to the industrial markets of some of the stronger developing countries, such as Brazil and India.
India, which has a thriving information-technology and services sector but millions of poor rural farmers, is a leading member of one of the key coalitions which rejected a ministerial meeting this weekend.
The "G33" is a group of developing countries (confusingly, there are 44 of them) with large farming populations. They are fighting to defend their rural populations against an onslaught from more competitive countries -- and their position illustrates the difficulty of pleasing everyone around the table.
The G33 accepts that it will have to lower trade barriers to agricultural markets as part of any agreement, but it wants to be able to protect certain "special products" -- those which are particularly important to livelihoods and food security, such as rice in India. It has also called for a "special safeguard mechanism," which could be invoked to protect specific markets from sudden surges of cut-price imports from stronger economies.
The technical details of the G33's proposals are, like most elements of the Geneva talks, mind-numbingly complex; but their reasoning is simple.
"We just want to give some assurance to our farmers," said Gusmardi Busmati, from Indonesia. "They are poor, they are small, probably, and they cannot compete in the world market -- these are the characteristics of the G33. If you can't give them a domestic market, they are going to get poorer and poorer, have no work and no hope."
Vandanna Aggarwal, of India, said the average size of a farm in rural india is just a hectare and a half.
"The climatic conditions that their agriculture faces are dismal. It's subsistence farming. It is not commercial agriculture," he said.
One reason often given by Europe and the US for not being more generous in cutting their own subsidies is political reaction back home.
However, the G33 are keen to point out that they, also have constituencies to satisfy.
Conditions
"You have to understand that the developing countries are already rebelling against the imposition of conditions by multilateral donors and multilateral banks," Serrano said. "This is not going to fly in Manila, or New Delhi, or Jakarta."
"Back home we have 40 million poor farmers waiting to see what the outcome will be," agreed Suleman Audu, of Nigeria. "My own constituency is already very critical: they would begin to question our membership of the WTO."
In a 1960s office block on a quiet street across the city, the Mauritian WTO ambassador, Naresh Servansing, has a different constituency in mind -- and a different group of hard-pressed farmers to defend. He represents the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries -- the ACP -- many of which have benefited from preferential access to European markets because of their status as former colonies, and are nervous of losing that advantage if rich countries lower their trade barriers dramatically as part of a Doha agreement.
"If there is an overwhelming level of ambition on tea, coffee, cotton and so on, then all these are doomed. If you liberalize in those markets, you are liberalizing only for Brazil, for Thailand, for Australia. Do you want a multilateral trading system to profit some countries at the expense of 30 or 40 more?" he said.
Servansing and his fellow ACP countries are arguing for smaller cuts in agricultural tariffs than the US is demanding, plus a transitional period to help his members adjust to the harsh new world.
Smoothing all these demands -- and many others -- is the challenge facing the WTO over the next few months and there is widespread pessimism in Geneva about the chances of success.
With little focus in the current negotiations on developing countries, some campaigners are already openly hoping the talks collapse.
But Servansing explained that even ACP members, who have a lot to lose from liberalization, do not want to risk the disintegration of the WTO which could follow from a walk-out.
"We have mixed feelings about the round, but on balance we can see that we need it to give us predictability, and certainty. We need a rule-based system that will curtail unilateral decisions from the US and the EU. We have a lot to lose if the round doesn't materialize, because then we will be in a complete vacuum," he said.
Everyone in Geneva has their own interests to defend, with many countries pushing on several fronts at once. Few are yet ready openly to contemplate failure, let alone a slow death for the WTO; but what Aggarwal calls the "chasm" between the US, the EU and their "dancing partners" shows little sign of narrowing, whatever metaphor they use to describe it.
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