Poor nations ask: 'Can we talk?'

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October 2006

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Poor nations ask: 'Can we talk?'
Leading industrial nations and developing countries have agreed in principle to resume trade negotiations, but leaders have yet to set a date or draw up any specific plans for reviving Doha Round global trade talks since they collapsed in July.

Despite repeated calls on all sides for communication lines to reopen, looming disagreements have created an impasse. At issue are questions of agriculture, particularly farm subsidies, tariffs, and market access.

Failure to continue negotiations, let alone reach an agreement, has prompted an outcry from international advocacy groups monitoring the situation.

“The inability of the U.S. and European union negotiators to reach agreement on farm subsidies and market access represents a lack of political will to help the poorest people on the planet use trade as a tool to life themselves out of poverty,” Kathy McKiernan, Communications Director for Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa (DATA), an organization aimed at attacking the roots of poverty in Africa, wrote in a statement on the group’s website.

“We want the negotiations to resume,” Pascal Lamy, Director General of the World Trade Organization, told The New York Times, “but I’m not sure we have all the elements in line.”

The Group of 20, or G20, an organization of developing nations modeled after the G8 grouping of industrial powers, has demanded that in return for opening their markets to the goods and services of industrial nations, the United States and other rich nations cut farm subsidies and tariffs that inhibit exports of agricultural exports from poorer nations.

Finger pointing between representatives of the United States and the European Union have further bogged down progress toward an agreement.

“The U.S. needs to make a fresh proposal during this time to reduce in real terms what it spends on trade-distorting subsidies and to discipline the programs it uses,” Peter Mandelson, the EU Trade Commissioner, told the Times. Mandelson has suggested that the proximity of trade talks to the U.S. midterm elections is the problem.

DATA has called on industrial nations to lower tariffs on products that developing nations have the capacity to export through tariff preference programs. It also urges limits on subsidies on crops produced by poorer nations, either through measures of the WTO or via domestic legislation.—John Celentani

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