World trade talks effort seen delayed for months
By Robert Evans
GENEVA, Jan 4 (Reuters) - World Trade Organisation (WTO) officials and diplomats return to work next week, but with little hope that the derailed effort to launch a new global round of liberalisation talks could be back on track soon.
Following the collapse of a ministerial conference in Seattle in December called to kick off the negotiations, the general feeling is that little can really be done until the next U.S. president is in place in just over a year's time.
``I don't see anything of significance as far as a round is concerned getting under way until February next year at the earliest, and maybe not for a while after that,'' said one trade negotiator back early after the year-end break.
Although talks on further opening of service industries like banking and insurance and on reducing barriers to freer world trade in farm produce are set to begin this month, diplomats said they were likely to move very slowly.
``Outside the framework of a round, I don't see pressure for any quick results being there,'' a Latin American envoy said.
The Seattle talks collapsed largely because of anger among developing countries, who make up the overwhelming majority of the WTO's 135 member states, at what they saw as an effort by some big powers to railroad them into new accords.
They argued that nothing was being offered to them in return for huge reforms they undertook as a result of the last negotiations, the wide-ranging 1986-93 Uruguay Round.
Envoys from emerging economies and poorer countries at the meeting were also enfuriated by the endorsement by President Bill Clinton of many of the demands of anti-WTO protesters in Seattle and of the trade agenda of U.S. labour unions.
PROTESTERS ``MISGUIDED AND SELF-RIGHTEOUS''
Although many protesters seemed to think they were fighting the Third World cause, developing country negotiators saw the demonstrations as simply another effort to force on them First World views on issues such as environment and labour conditions.
``In many ways, those misguided and self-righteous people hardened us in our determination not to be pushed around by anyone,'' said one African envoy who was in Seattle.
These attitudes, already forged in a year-long pre-Ministerial battle over the appointment of a new WTO director-general and months of scrapping over the agenda for a new round, are bound to dominate in the coming months, diplomats say.
In this light, they said, the top-level February gathering in Bangkok of member countries of the United Nations trade and development agency UNCTAD would be of key importance in formulating the agenda for the world's less rich states.
Although the four-yearly summit of UNCTAD, the 36-year-old standing U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, cannot take binding decisions, unlike key meetings of the WTO, its deliberations are basic to developing country cohesion.
``In the present climate, UNCTAD will certainly move into the trade limelight,'' said one Western envoy, who had in the past often dismissed the agency as a talking shop.
Developing country diplomats, who often combine their role as negotiators at the WTO with that of ambassador to the U.N. agency which is also based in Geneva, say if the big powers, and especially the United States, want to make up for mistakes made before and at Seattle, Bangkok would be the place to begin.
Before that, however, Clinton is due later this month at the annual World Economic Forum in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos, where he is expected to try to convince global business leaders that his message was blurred in Seattle.
``But there is a stronger feeling than ever that his main concern is to keep different U.S. domestic constituencies happy before the presidential elections, and that nothing more can be expected on trade from him,'' one European envoy said.