The failure of the Doha Round has dominated the views about the WTO and its leadership on the grounds that (a) it clings to a set of trade liberalization objectives that have gone past their “sell-by” date after more than a decade of unmet and unrealistic deadlines (b) the leadership of the WTO has relied too much on a successful Doha Round to define the value of the WTO, and (c) the premise of the Doha Round was flawed from the very beginning as a single undertaking dependent on a consensus among a growing number of member-states for a combination of trade liberalization AND development objectives.  Our Webinar discussants actually challenged this view by suggesting that the WTO and its leadership had accomplished a great deal in the past decade in spite of the failure of the Doha Round to reach a timely conclusion.

We had noted already the substantial increase in WTO membership (from 76, including the EU, when it was first established in 1994 to 158 as of February 2013); the significance of its dispute settlement regime; the quality of its information services; and the serendipitous and positive impact of its reports on protectionism for the G20 in the aftermath of the financial and economic crisis.  We were reminded by our discussants that Director-General Pascal Lamy had also initiated a set of bold outreach initiatives – from the public forums that opened up the WTO to so many non-state actors, to his engagement with the heads of the WHO and WIPO on the issue of public health, innovation and intellectual property, and with the head of the ILO on jobs and employment.  We have also reported on the WTO’s work with the OECD on a new methodology involving the concept of “value added” trade and research on non-tariff measures especially in the area of climate change and environmental policies.  The general impression is that Mr. Lamy’s tenure has involved a more transparent process of open communication with the outside world and numerous opportunities for NGOs and others from outside the formal governance institutions of the WTO to influence the trade policy debate.

From the CMBD News 25 February 2013

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The International Chamber of Commerce, headquartered in Paris, has a Trade and Investment Committee that brought ICC members to Geneva this month for a conference at the WTO to launch its “World Trade Agenda”.  DuPont’s Geoffrey Gamble is the chair of that Committee, and we have benefited from his insights on trade issues in past CMBD meetings.  On this occasion, Mr. Gamble was joined by the senior leadership of the ICC, including Gérard Worms, Victor Fung and Harold McGraw III.  They took turns moderating lively panel discussions on simplifying costs and procedures for trade, synergies between multilateral and plurilateral agreements, obstacles to trade and what does business really want.  Director-General Pascal Lamy welcomed the group and its initiative as a timely intervention to redefine the global agenda on trade negotiations.  In particular, he mentioned the political shifts of more actors and voices, the need to start measuring trade as value-added, the ripeness of reaching agreement on trade facilitation, and the need for business to resist protectionist pressures.   The target for the ICC is to conclude the initiative by 22 April 2013 at a Business Summit in Doha.

On the value-added front, by the way, we also note that the WTO has agreed with the OECD to go ahead with developing a common methodology and database drawn from the OECD’s work on inter-country input-output tables.  There will be a consultative process as they jointly develop this new approach to value-added trade statistics, based on what they describe as “trade in tasks” that reflect the domestic value added in trade.  As Mr. Lamy has been pointing out, globalization has changed markets, not only in terms of the technology in global supply chains but also the expansion and addition of new markets to the global economy.

A few weeks ago the WTO General Council elected by consensus Norwegian Ambassador Elin Johanson as Chairperson for the year, but the GC was delayed in reaching a consensus for the other chairpersons, including that of the Dispute Settlement Body.  Traditionally, the Chair of the Dispute Settlement Board becomes the Chair of the General Council in the following year, and it seems that it took longer than usual to reach a consensus on this and other appointments.  The reason?  Next year, the WTO General Council will elect a new Director-General to succeed Mr. Pascal Lamy, whose second term ends in September 2013.  The Chair of the General Council in 2013 therefore will play a key role in overseeing the election.  The original slate of chairpersons apparently included the ambassador of Singapore for this post, but the consensus was reached and confirmed at a special session of the General Council on Friday, 24 February for the Dispute Settlement Board Chairperson to be Ambassador Shahid Bashir from Pakistan.  The following is the full slate of new Chairpersons (also available here):

The General Council also agreed on the appointment of the following chairs of the bodies under the Trade Negotiations Committee:

These bodies of the Trade Negotiations Committee are involved in aspects of the Doha Development Agenda, and the Chairs continue to serve until the next full Ministerial Conference, unlike the regular committees for which the Chairs are only appointed for one year. It is interesting to note that the former chair of the Special Session of the Committee on Trade and Development was Ambassador Shahid Bashir and is now Ambassador Kwok Fook Seng of Singapore. The Chair of the regular Committee on Trade and Development, Ambassador Anthony Mothae Maruping, by the way, is also the Chair of the Preparatory Committee for UNCTAD XIII, a double duty.

The Committee is also hosting a special Workshop on “Aid for Trade, sustainable development and the green economy” on Wednesday, 29 February, just prior to its regular session. The report for this workshop provides an overview of where Aid for Trade is supporting green economy initiatives to show the increasing synergy between the two.  They are mostly in economic infrastructure projects and less in building productive capacity and even less in trade policy and regulatory projects.  See the notice and report here.

Following the prognosis of impasse in the Doha Round of trade liberalization at the 8th WTO Ministerial Conference before the holidays in December, a few of the trade ministers came back together in their traditional “side events” at the World Economic Forum in Davos in late January, hosted by the Swiss Economics Minister, currently Mr. Johann Schneider-Ammann. Some of them also participated in a WEF panel on “After Doha: The Future of Global Trade”. See a report here. New negotiating approaches are to be encouraged in this coming year of caution, a year in which “political energy” is in “short supply”, according to the latest turn-of-phrase from the WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy. Parallels are made to the shortage of political energy in climate change and the management of currency exchange rates, but no direct reference seems to be made to the ambitions for political energy in the “shaping of new models” for the “great transformations” that were featured in the overriding theme for the Davos event this year.

US Trade Representative Ron Kirk suggests that a plurilateral services negotiation of the willing might be explored, while the major emerging economy trade ministers of Brazil, India and South Africa reacted negatively. All seem to agree that the WTO should continue to exert its weight against protectionism, fight for the interests of the least developed countries and maybe look for the trade agenda of the 21st century. We do note that the WTO’s Working Group on Trade, Debt and Finance will in fact have a two-day symposium on 27 to 28 March 2012 on the connection between exchange rates and trade. So there is some momentum on 21st century type issues. We still haven’t heard anything more, however, about Mr. Lamy’s proposal to appoint a Panel of Multi-Stakeholders. But that may be coming soon. Meanwhile, a lot of bilateral and regional trade negotiations attract attention, including the possibility of an EU-US initiative. And the dispute resolution process at the WTO continues to churn out important decisions, including a recent appellate ruling against China on raw materials for steel, aluminum and chemicals brought by the US, EU and Mexico.

Olivier de Schutter, the Special Rapporter on the Right to Food at the Human Rights Council, caused a bit of a stir by issuing a report on The World Trade Organization and the Post-Global Food Crisis Agenda just prior to the 8th WTO Ministerial Conference. The report encouraged developing countries to insulate their domestic markets from global agricultural markets and multinational enterprises. See the report here. The report triggered an exchange from Director-General Pascal Lamy who reiterated the evidence showing how distortions of production and trade detract from the achievement of long-run food security. See the report of Mr. Lamy’s reply here. The issue of food security also stirred the one visible protest gathering at MC8 of farmer, labour and other social movements around the theme “Our World Is Not For Sale”. At the WTO, the Secretariat has initiated a new “Food Security” website (here), and one can anticipate active WTO involvement with the UN system and the new Agricultural Market Information System in the year ahead, not to mention the many outstanding issues on export controls and the three pillars of the Doha Round on agriculture.

Observing the opening plenary and subsequent discussions among trade ministers at the 8th WTO Ministerial Conference from 15 to 17 December 2011, we were impressed with how pervasive were the intonations about looking for new approaches to finish the Doha Round, and about how urgent it was to resist protectionism. The impasse in the Doha Round was widely acknowledged; the need to adapt to the changes in the world for a rebalancing in the contributions and responsibilities between emerging and advanced economies was recognized; but the dialogue went no further than to repeat differing views about the appropriate shares for each, to support WTO scrutiny of protectionist measures and the reluctance to take on anything new. There were, to be sure, some significant events – the accession of the largest remaining economy outside of the WTO; the accession of others to expand the numbers while also opening up the possibilities for easier accession of the many Least Developed Countries that are still struggling to clear the accession hurdles; the sudden agreement on a revised Global Procurement Agreement that might even include China this time around; and a few odds and ends of consensus on electronic commerce, TRIPS non-violation complaints, small and vulnerable economies and the fourth trade policy review mechanism. The Chair’s Summary by Nigerian Trade Minister Olusegun Olutoyin Aganga emphasized that the delegates had conveyed the strong collective message that the WTO is more important than ever and that the constructive dialogue signified an improving WTO atmosphere and outlook for 2012.

In addition to the formalities, the Conference did serve as the platform for a few useful announcements. One was a new portal on data accessibility that is quite impressive. Known as the Integrated Trade Intelligence Portal (I-TIP), it consolidates the WTO data on non-tariff measures, and provides access to tariff rates and import flows on the same products for which  non-tariff measures have been notified, and it makes this all available for the first time to the general public, including governments, the private sector, academia and the public at large. See here. The platform will be adding data on services and on intellectual property rights over time. Another announcement came from the Director-General that he would be convening a multi-stakeholder panel to “look at the real drivers of today’s and tomorrow’s world trade” with a mandate to report back by the end of next year. And yet another announcement that was slipped into the Director-General’s closing remarks was that this was his last regular Ministerial Conference in his current position, thereby conveying that he will not be seeking a third term, since his second term ends in September 2013, and one can presume that the next regular Ministerial Conference will occur sometime after that. See Mr. Lamy’s closing remarks and other plenary statements here.