As WTO Negotiations Remain Stalled, U.S. Commitment Reiterated

U.S. official describes difficulty ahead after another disappointing week

With long-stalled World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations poised to miss yet another deadline, a senior U.S. trade official says the United States remains committed to keep working.

"We have to have real tangible, meaningful, substantial progress through May and June if we are going to get things done here by the summer, which is what we have to do to get the schedules together," the official, who asked not to be identified, said at an April 21 briefing in Geneva.

The briefing followed a week of negotiations on agriculture, where by all accounts the parties remain far apart - after 4.5 years - on the core issues of reducing tariffs and domestic support for farmers.

Trade ministers at the December 2005 meeting in Hong Kong set April 30 as the most-recent deadline for WTO negotiators to agree on modalities - specific formulas and time frames - for cutting agricultural tariffs and subsidies, and industrial tariffs. (See WTO Hong Kong Ministerial Meeting.)

Crawford Falconer, chairman of the agricultural negotiations, told reporters in Geneva that the deadline would be missed and that he saw no purpose in setting a new deadline. Similarly, Don Stephenson, chairman of the negotiations on industrial goods, reportedly said the parties remain far apart.

Earlier in the week, President Bush reiterated the importance the United States attaches to successful completion of the WTO negotiations, which are formally called the Doha Development Agenda.

"But again, it takes two to tango," the unidentified U.S. trade official said. "We've come forward with very ambitious market opening proposals. We're still waiting for the response from others, and we hope that the technical talks we've had this week can help prepare the stage for those big decisions that we need to move this forward."

He lamented the lack of political will needed to make politically difficult concessions in the negotiations by other parties, including Japan and other food-importing countries and, especially, the European Union (EU).

The EU proposal would produce, through a combination of high tariffs and exemptions, little or no real additional market access for agriculture, he said.

"Their proposals to date have really been quite disappointing," the official said. "The European Union has come forward and said they will do nothing more on domestic support than they've already done."

The Doha round is scheduled to conclude in December, a deadline effectively required by the scheduled expiration in mid-2007 of the U.S. president's trade promotion authority (TPA). Under TPA, Congress restricts itself only to approve or reject a negotiated trade agreement, within strict time limits and without amendments.

Missing the April 30 deadline simply makes achieving successful conclusion by December that much more difficult, the official said.

"We're cramming more and more decisions into a smaller and smaller time frame," he said. "If we work real hard and we have a very good spirit, you can get a lot done in a short period of time."

Source: U.S. Department of State

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