Global trade talks ended late on Friday night in complete failure, sparking victory cries from anti-WTO groups who had laid siege to the talks throughout the week.
The 135-member World Trade Organization was instead left almost exactly where it was at the end of the previous round five years ago, when members pledged to hold new negotiations from January 2000 on just two sectors, agriculture and services.
The collapse of the Seattle talks marks one of the largest defeats for President Bill Clinton's trade policy in his seven years in office, and it was a serious blow to his administration, which had hoped to use the Seattle meeting to advance a bold agenda for trade talks that would stretch into the next millennium.
PHOTO: REUTERS
And it was a severe embarrassment for the five-year-old WTO as it enabled the tens of thousands of anti-WTO protesters who had descended on Seattle aiming to block the talks to claim victory.
"Ministers have agreed to suspend the work of the ministerial," a clearly exhausted US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, told the final plenary session of the meeting after admitting defeat. Before the talks began Barshefsky had said that "failure is not an option."
"Negotiations on agriculture and on services will commence in January under already established WTO rules for such negotiations and those will be held in Geneva" where the WTO is based, Barshefsky said.
As for other issues, WTO director general Mike Moore was left with the task of consulting member countries and coming up with what Barshefsky described as a "creative" way to complete the ministerial talks and launch a new round sometime in the future.
Moore nonetheless insisted "it was a remarkable meeting, much was done," pledging "that work will not be lost" but built upon in the future.
Barshefsky blamed a lack of political will for the failure to reach agreement, while European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy insisted it was a "no blame game."
But while WTO ministers expressed disappointment, anti-WTO protesters who had literally taken the town by storm said they had succeeded in their aim of halting a new trade round.
"We shut down the talks, they are limping back to Geneva," said Juliette Beck, a spokeswoman for Direct Action Network, a coalition which organized the week of sometimes violent anti-WTO protests.
The coalition brought some 40,000 people into the city center last Tuesday, delaying the opening of the meeting for five hours as peaceful protest degenerated into pitched battles between police and demonstrators which continued sporadically throughout the week.
It was clear by the end of the four days that even if the ministers had found a compromise on agriculture, a raft of other problems waited in the wings.
The participants were not even able to claim success in a much-vaunted initiative by industrial countries to abolish tariffs and quotas on imports from the world's poorest countries.
WTO members had hoped this would give a psychological boost to efforts to launch a new round, but in his final press conference after midnight on Friday, EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy had to admit he had failed to win over his US, Japanese and Canadian partners.
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