The host went all out, but the guests had nothing to talk about, and everybody went home early.
Paul Blustein sums it up for Sunday's Washington Post: Trade Ministers Give Up on Compromise. Geneva Conference Collapses Over Agricultural Tariffs and Subsidies. (July 2):
A conference intended to achieve a last-ditch breakthrough in global trade negotiations collapsed Saturday, sharply diminishing prospects for an agreement that has been touted as a potential boon for the world economy and poor countries in particular.
Trade ministers from about 60 countries, who had planned to negotiate at the World Trade Organization's headquarters here until Sunday and perhaps even Monday, said this morning that they were so hopelessly deadlocked on issues such as reducing farm subsidies and tariffs that they were going home early.....
Participants in the meeting held out the prospect that negotiations over the next several weeks could result in a compromise by the end of the month on the main issues in the Doha round, the talks begun in 2001 to lower trade barriers worldwide....
But seasoned trade diplomats expressed skepticism about the chances for a deal because the gaps are so wide and the negotiating positions are so rigid. Inability to reach a compromise this month would almost surely doom chances for completing the Doha round before new political problems complicate the task even further -- prime among them the looming expiration of President Bush's authority to negotiate trade agreements.
James Kantor describes what happened at an early meeting of the G6 - the EU, US, Brazil, Australia and India - the countries whose discussions were expected to drive the ministerial: A sense of being on 'brink of a failure' takes hold at WTO meeting (International Herald Tribune, July 2):
Suppose we gave you all you wanted, the European Union's trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, asked his host, the U.S. trade representative, Susan Schwab, according to several people who attended the meeting. If we did that, Mandelson asked Schwab, could you move?
What happened next at the closed- door gathering last week is disputed. Even so, the bottom line seemed to be that after five years, last-ditch talks aimed at tearing down barriers to trade to help alleviate poverty and lift economic growth were still going nowhere....
In an interview Saturday, before her expected departure from Geneva on Sunday, Schwab said that she had responded to Mandelson by saying that she would be ready to negotiate if the EU was prepared to lead by cutting its own duties on food products, which protect uncompetitive European farmers, by significantly more than its current offer of 38 percent to 54 percent.
But others at the meeting characterized the exchange between Mandelson and Schwab somewhat differently.
Speaking on condition of anonymity because they expected to take part in delicate trade negotiations in the future, these people said Schwab declined to give Mandelson a clear response because she knew that Mandelson faced constraints - in particular from Paris - that prevented him from ever appreciably raising his offer.
Still other people at the meeting took away yet another conclusion: that Schwab, like Mandelson, had come to the talks in Geneva with a big question mark hanging over her leeway to make a more generous offer than the one already on the table to reduce politically sensitive payouts to U.S. farmers that still add up to about $20 billion a year.
"She does not have a mandate," said one of the top trade officials at the meeting. Schwab "didn't come prepared with the right answers," this official said.
Revised July 2.
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