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G8 leaders struggle to fulfill Doha promises

A protest fire burns near the landmark of Geneva, Switzerland, the Jet d'eau, a water fountain, Saturday. About 50 fires were lit by anti-globalization activists around lake Geneva as a sign of opposition. Anti-globalization activists gathered in Lausanne and Geneva on the eve of the G8 summit in nearby Evian, France. PHOTO: AP

The G8 summit presents leaders from the world's most powerful democracies a chance to breathe new life into floundering negotiations aimed at eliminating crippling trade barriers.

The heads of state or government from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the US gathered from yesterday at a time of mounting concern for the fate of an ambitious round of trade liberalization talks launched with great fanfare in the Qatari capital Doha in November 2001.

Since then the countries that launched the round, working under the auspices of the WTO, have been unable to agree on precisely how they plan to tear down trade barriers by the agreed target date of the end of next year.

Key deadlines have been missed and a cloud now hangs over this September's full WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico that is to serve as a mid-term review of progress under the Doha round.

"There is no reason to begin doubting the possibility of meeting the target date of end-2004 for finishing the negotiations," WTO director general Supachai Panitchpakdi said in Washington last month. "No reason, that is, unless governments decide that their political will to complete the exercise is no longer there."

Evian, according to trade analysts, is the place where such political will needs to be very much in evidence.

"The Evian summit should ... provide renewed political impetus for the Doha round of global trade talks in the WTO, which are faltering badly, by indicating the participants' willingness to resolve the present impasse over agriculture and other central issues," C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Washington-based Institute for International Economics, said in a column for the New York Times.

"Saving the Doha round will take much more than the hard work of WTO negotiators and ambassadors in Geneva," former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo said, also in the New York Times. "The issue must go to the highest political levels."

Threatening the Doha process are lingering disputes over measures to make life-saving generic drugs available to impoverished nations along with moves to eliminate agricultural export subsidies in developed countries that distort trade and harm the interests of developing nations.

WTO ministers meeting in Doha agreed that poor countries grappling with health emergencies such as AIDS could order the domestic production of medicines patented by western companies.

That agreement resolved the issue for developing countries with their own pharmaceutical industry but left hanging the problem of poorer states without the capacity to produce drugs.

The US, mindful of the interests of its big drug companies, is blocking a draft settlement on grounds that the proposed wording could be interpreted to include medicines for non-infectious diseases such as obesity and impotence.

A second source of discord concerns subsidies offered by governments in developed countries to help their farmers export their products.

The World Bank has estimated that such assistance, which drives down prices and punishes poor countries that depend on agricultural exports, amounts to US$350 billion (296 billion euros) a year -- vastly eclipsing the US$50 billion that industrialized nations spend on development assistance each year.
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