Will the G-20 save Doha?

Probably not. The discount on this, the lastest of their promises, is deservedly steep according to the Global Trade Alert website.

It's not a problem of mendacity or lack of 'political courage'. There is simply no consensus on the liberalizing mandate of Doha among this group; we've tested that proposition to exhaustion in the past eight years. The G20 is effectively the same group that has been managing the WTO negotiations since early 2004, when the negotiations resumed after the Cancún collapse. To believe that these 20 Chefs could now confect a banquet from the 'trash pile' of the Agriculture and NAMA negotiating texts would be to believe that heads of government have been 'holding out' on their trade ministers all this time.

Although I doubt this Group can progress Doha, other groups or coalitions will very likely be the basis of future multilateral frameworks to open markets for goods and services. Future agreements will encourage different sub-sets of the WTO's membership to pursue their own objectives without the constraint of WTO's one-rule-for-all.

I detect a growing demand to consign to the pyre of historical error the clumsy, impenetrable, Heath-Robinson trade-management machinery embalmed in the December 2008 'Chairman's Texts' on Agriculture and NAMA.

"The aims set at Doha have become unreachable in the early years of a new century when the distribution of economic power at global level was starting to change and the needs of WTO participants are no longer what they were in the 1990s." Roderick Abbott, former Deputy Director-General of WTO

The G20 is not going to lead the trading system out of this mess. But what of the G2 (US and China)? Where does their interest lie?

These two face—in different ways, but now inescapably—some of the biggest adjustments of all in the next decade. Certainly they see this. Probably they'll consider it in their interest to make sure that their mutual adjustment can be managed in a functional global trading framework. Probably, they'll want the WTO disputes settlement system to function transparently, fairly and without much interference. But will they require the continuation of the WTO's 'one-rule-for-all'? China has been an unenthusiastic participant in Doha. Will it be content to see the USA pursue, in the alternative, 'critical mass' agreements on agriculture (for example) without joining them? Or will China and the USA prefer, as a background to their own re-alignment, the strictly reciprocal framework of the WTO's 'single undertaking', even at the price of stalemate on multilateral liberalization?

Tags for this entry: wto agriculture g20 nama