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WTO talks collapse amid U.S. intransigence
I always found it comically-brazen hypocrisy that the US continues to subsidize its own farmers while insisting the rest of the world remove all tariffs subsidies duties and every other type of assistance.....
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WTO global trade talks collapse
Last-ditch efforts to unblock the Doha round of global trade talks have collapsed, with fears it will take months for negotiations to resume.
A meeting of leading trading nations, the so-called G6 group, hit a stalemate after the US and Europe failed to agree over farm subsidies and tariffs.
After 14-hours of talks on Sunday, discussions reconvened to see what could be salvaged, but to no avail.
The EU has blamed the US for the talks hitting an impasse.
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'Serious setback'
After assessing the situation, World Trade Organization (WTO) director-general Pascal Lamy decided no more negotiations should be attempted.
Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim said: "This is a serious setback, a major setback."
European Union trade commissioner Peter Mandelson said he was "profoundly disappointed" that talks had stumbled.
He said that only the US had been unable to show flexibility in its negotiations.
France also laid blame at the door of the US, criticising its "intransigence".
However, Ms Schwab insisted that the US remained "fully committed to multilateral trading system".
She said that the collapse meant that countries were more likely to pursue trade disputes at the WTO.
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Charity Christian Aid said that the collapse of talks struck "a terrible blow" for the world's poor.
The collapse of the trade talks had removed the most important weapon in the fight against global poverty, said its senior trade analyst Dr Claire Melamed.
"It seems that the selfish intransigence of the US and Europe has finally wrecked any chance of a successful outcome for these trade talks which were meant to help developing countries," she said.
However John Hilary, director of campaigns and policy at War on Want said that the collapse was good for the world's poor saying that no deal was better than a bad deal for the poor.
"Any chance of a genuinely pro-poor outcome was lost long ago, and the deal on the table would have caused great damage to developing countries," he said.
"The WTO has failed to deliver for the world¿s poorest communities, and the international community must now rethink its whole approach to the trade talks."
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Developing nations want Europe and US to lower farming subsidies and tariffs, while Washington and Brussels want greater access to manufactured goods markets.
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quick snippet:
Who is to blame?
As the prospects for a deal have receded, each side has sought to blame the other.
The EU says that the US has been too ambitious and has not shown enough flexibility to reach agreement.
The US, in its turn, blames protectionist pressures around the EU Common Agricultural Policy.
And the developing countries say that the rich nations were never serious about opening up their markets, and until they do, they are in no hurry to open their own.
The key problem has been that free trade in agriculture - the centrepiece of this trade round - is far more difficult to negotiate than free trade in manufacturing.
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WTO talks collapse amid U.S. intransigence
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07-24-2006, 08:24 PM
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