Speaking to the European Parliament’s International Trade Committee on 17 October 2006, Pascal Lamy said that the failure of the trade talks would “not be a major economic shock that would precipitate any particular market crisis...but rather as a slowly developing disease that would progressively sap the strength of the multilateral trading system built up over the past 50 years”.
He said that the talks now had six months to advance if US Congress was to be convinced to extend the Bush administration’s trade negotiating authority. Otherwise, it could take years for talks to resume.
He said that the WTO would try to exert more pressure on the main players - India, Brazil, Australia, Japan, the EU and the US - to restart these vital negotiations, which have been suspended since July (see EurActiv 24 July 2006), but warned that there was "no way this negotiation will resume if the agricultural stumbling block remains".
He told Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, at a conference organised by UNICE, that another obstacle to a rapid resumption of the Doha Round negotiations was the growing number of bilateral and regional talks, which risk deflecting attention from a global deal.
Mandelson presented his new trade vision last week, containing plans for bilateral agreements with India, South Korea, ASEAN and Mercosur (see EurActiv 5 October 2006).
But Lamy said: "Most [WTO members] cannot afford to ride both horses. There is a resource diversion problem," adding that the world’s poorest countries' problems need to be tackled at WTO level: "Most developing countries have more problems with subsidies, with anti-dumping than they have with tariffs. These are systemic issues."
