A Pisgah sight of the Doha deal

(Update: the Ministerial meeting will not take place) Ahead of a likely attempt by WTO Minsiters to spy the promised land before the year is out In one last attempt to wrest consensus from growling discord, the (retiring) Chair of the WTO Agriculture Negotiations has released another version of his 120-page 'modalities' paper (.pdf, about 1mb) for the proposed Doha Round agreement on Agriculture. The Chair of the NAMA group has simultaneously released a new text on non-agricultural market access negotiations.

Predictably, the agriculture text contains new regressions—that is, new means of increasing, rather than 'substantially reducing' protection—that have been grafted to the proposals by an ugly sort of frankenstein surgery. Will the monster rise from the table at Ministers' command? I hope not; I would prefer another route to the completion of Doha.

This is Ambassador Crawford Falconer's last attempt to lead WTO members out of the wilderness. He has done his best with an impossible brief: to make an agreement among governments that don't agree.

"Everything is conditional in the deepest sense in any case. But the changes made at this time now represent a best estimate of where there is additional good reason to believe there would prove to be consensus if everything was to come together as a modalities package." (extract from Crawford Falconer's press release)

A short list of the changes (I can't call them highlights) I've noticed in the agriculture text follows

• Several square brackets on thresholds and targets (e.g. in domestic support cuts) removed
• A "tariff cap" that isn't: 'sensitive' products may have tariffs greater than 100% (!!) with a small (0.5%) expansion in the tariff quota and of course there are special 'exceptions' for the astronomical levels of protection in Iceland, Japan, Norway, Switzerland that are allowed to breach the 100% cap in non-sensitive products.
• Sensitive product quota expansion of 3% to 4% of domestic consumption as determined by a method ('partial designation') designed to so confuse the issue of what a 'product' is that, in reality, you can discount the growth factor by (say) the 'number you first thought of...'
• A set of proposals (in an additional paper) for accommodating the demand from Canada and Japan that they should be allowed to create new tariff quotas as part of this substantial improvement in market access: a new regression in the Doha modalities
• A complex set of provisions to permit developing countries to breach their pre-Doha bound rates of duty as part of a Special Safeguard Mechanism (another new regression in the Doha modalities)

Tags for this entry: trade wto agriculture doha nama