The Custom-House

France still objects to further E.U. farm concessions

Last week France requested a meeting of the E.U. foreign ministers, hoping they would limit E.U. trade negotiator Peter Mandelson's ability to make agricultural concessions.

This week the ministers met, but didn't impose the constraints on Mandelson's negotiating stance that France had hoped for.

Today the French have indicated that despite the ministers' decision, they can't accept any more agricultural concessions.  Richard Waddington and William Schomberg report:

"Slow boat to China"

What does it mean: What's the origin of "slow boat to China"?

Inching towards Hong Kong

There was a burst of activity in the Doha agricultural negotiations last week. 

The U.S. led off with numerical proposals on Monday.  The E.U. followed with ideas of its own , as did the "Group of 20"  (developing countries led by Brazil and India).

The Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest has a very useful summing up of the first part of the week: Ag Subsidies On Negotiating Table; Haggling Underway  (Bridges, October 12)  Peter Gallagher has a useful post on the week's events.  He's particularly interesting about the the ways the strategies of the U.S. and E.U. negotiators reflect their need to fend off domestic critics at the same time they move the negotiations forward.

Later in the week, France suggested that the E.U. trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, needed to be reined in.  This week a meeting of the E.U. foreign ministers declined to do so.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) the U.S., the E.U., Brazil, India, and Australia, (the "Group of Five Interested Parties") is going to get together to see if they can make more progress.  The five represent a diverse range of interests, hopefully reflecting the interests of the wider community of WTO member nations.

Alan Beattie reviews the interests of the different parties: Constellation of interests clouds Doha talks. (Financial Times, October 18)

The last 10 days events are good news.  Agriculture is only one of the topics on the table in the Doha Round, but it is the most important, and nations are waiting to see what happens here before moving forward on other topics.  The U.S. move last Monday was a big step towards making things more concrete.  Now, apparently today, the E.U. trade commissioner has fended off an internal E.U. attempt to constrain his negotiating space.  We'll see what happens tomorrow.

This is good:

The E.U. gave its trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, the go-ahead to negotiate: Mandelson gets nod from EU (Tom Wright, International Herald Tribune, Oct 18):

European foreign ministers on Tuesday rejected a French proposal to rein in the negotiating authority of Peter Mandelson, the European Union's trade commissioner, keeping alive for now hopes of reaching a global trade deal...

France was upset by Mandelson's proposal last week for deep cuts to EU farm subsidies. But at the EU meeting, the French proposal won support only from countries with large farm sectors like Greece and Ireland.  Notably, Germany, which has been sympathetic to France in the past, declined to give its backing.

By reaffirming Mandelson's mandate, the EU ministers are underlining their commitment to forge a compromise with the United States and developing nations over farm aid - a key sticking point in trade talks...

As negotiations progress, Mandelson will have to balance a growing division between mainly Southern European nations that support the current regime - under which the EU pays out about $60 billion annually to farmers - and countries like Britain, Norway and Sweden that back cuts in the subsidies...

You can't tell the Doha Round players without a program

Jacques Chai Chomthongdi describes the different agricultural negotiating blocs, and what each wants, for the Focus on the Global South: The "G-Guide" Groupings in the WTO Agricultural Negotiations."

Chomthongdi uses a lot of jargon without explaining it.  Here's a glossary: The Terms of Trade and Other Wonders.  Deardorff's Glossary of International Economics.  Here's another glossary from the USDA Economic Research Service: wto: glossaries .  The WTO web page on the agricultural negotiations has some useful background as well:  The current negotiations .

Ready to riot?

Some of those who think that no Doha agreement is better for those in poor countries than a weak or bad agreement are getting ready to take their protests to the streets.

Gustavo Capdevila provides a sympathetic report on their plans: Anti-WTO Protesters Back on the Streets  (Inter Press News Agency, Oct 10).

Implicit or explicit in the story:

• No agreement is better than an agreement, especially for countries in Latin America and Africa
• Street action can play an important role in derailing WTO negotiations.  The riots in Seattle are a valuable model ("When we look at Seattle and Cancún, it is very important to underline the role played by civil society in derailing these ministerials. We hope to play the same role in Hong Kong," said Filipino activist Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South.")
• The WTO member countries are trying to arrange as many details as possible before the meeting in Hong Kong, so opponents of an agreement need to arrange demonstrations at as many of these preliminary meetings as possible.
• " One of the slogans launched for the current campaign, "Hong Kong will be the WTO's Stalingrad," clearly reflects the intentions of the non-governmental groups..."

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong,the government is making its own preparations.  As reported in Bridges: Area Around Hong Kong WTO Ministerial Conference Oredered Closed To Public .

This can't be good

Alan Beattie, Raphael Minder, and Frances Williams report that France has called an emergency meeting of European Union ministers to address it's concerns that the EU's trade representative, Peter Mandelson, is giving away too much on agricultural tariffs and subsidies: Emergency meeting called on Doha offer (Financial Times, October 13) :

France on Thursday night called for an emergency meeting of European Union ministers to discuss growing concerns in Paris that Europe will concede too much ground in the Doha round of trade talks...

...France's concerns, backed by 12 other member states, revolve around maintaining the EU's farm tariffs and subsidies.

...The EU offer this week involved a 70 per cent cut in the upper limits for the subsidies that are regarded as distorting trade. But its proposed cuts to tariffs would have seen the highest reduced by only 50 per cent, as opposed to the 90 per cent reduction proposed by the US.

Almost everyone will gain from trade liberalization says OECD

There's a new study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (apparently built around a series of country-economic sector case studies) finding that: "All but a very small number of developing countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, stand to gain more than they lose from successful completion of the Doha Round of multilateral trade talks..." 

The full news release  (OECD urges freer trade combined with structural adjustment to reap benefits from globalisation ) is here:

No breakthrough for now

An informal meeting of key trade ministers has broken up without resolving the agriculture impasse.  U.S. and E.U. proposals were not enough to break the deadlock, in good part because, as Peter Gallagher points out here, they remained pretty vague: Proposals for farm trade reforms surface .

Richard Waddington describes the meetings here:

Problems replacing a supreme leader

From the time the Communists won the civil war in China in 1949, until the 1990s, party leadership was concentrated in a supreme (core) leader, was highly personal, and was subject to few limits of law or regulation. 

Kenneth Lieberthal (Governing China ) points to the problem this created for arranging the succession of one leader by another: