WTO Agricultural Negotiation Update

Yesterday, the WTO released the following news on the advances of agricultural negotiations of the Doha “Development” Round:

Intensive consultations among a group of importing and exporting countries will be allowed to continue for a few more days in an effort to achieve a breakthrough that would also allow progress in the agriculture talks as a whole. By 31 March or earlier New Zealand Ambassador Crawford Falconer, who chairs the talks, will reconvene multilateral talks so that representatives of the full membership can negotiate the outcome and continue with other major issues, leading to a revised draft blueprint of the final deal. That is what he concluded after hearing members’ comments on 14 March 2008.

For more information and to listen Mr Falconer declarations go to this WTO page.

We will see if this process will create a breakthrough in the negotiations. Personally, I am not very confident that this will happen at least for two reasons:

1. There are still a large amount of issues where Members have very far positions.
2. An important number of Members (e.g. the US) have not enough political will to agree on the necessary concessions.

Furthermore, in the last seven years I heard many times that a breaktrough was feasible and that they will respect a dedline that they agree. Almost every of these deadlines were posponed. They lose their credibility. Nevertheless, a miracle or a surprising outcome it is always possible as the Uruguy Round showed us.

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