Doha Is Not Dead

Dec. 19, 2005
But 'a lot of heavy lifting' remains.

Expectations were low for the just-completed meeting of 149 trade ministers from around the world in Hong Kong. Analysts -- and even some government officials -- cautioned against expecting much coming out of the meeting, the latest in a series of attempts to provide momentum to the Doha Round of international trade negotiations, now at least a year behind the original target for their completion.

Expectations were low, and they were met, especially if you are John Engler, president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), who complained that tough decisions on reducing trade barriers to manufactured goods were not made at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Hong Kong. "Basically the ministers just kicked the can down the road and pushed the tough decisions out to April 2006," said Engler. Among other items, the NAM wanted to see the meeting make real progress on cutting tariffs and lowering non-tariff trade barriers. "Basically the WTO ministers are leaving us with four more months of wandering around the desert without a compass," Engler asserted. "Manufacturing goods are 75% of world trade, and we need a realization that cutting industrial trade barriers is an essential part of a comprehensive Doha agreement."

However, the mid-December meeting was not a do-nothing gathering, and the Doha Round, named after the capital of Qatar where it was launched in November 2001, is not dead. The trade ministers set April 30, 2006 as the date for completing the outline of a trade agreement and yearend 2006 as the time for wrapping-up the round. They agreed to eliminate agricultural export subsidies by 2013 and to increase the number of products from developing countries that can enter the U.S. and other developed-country markets duty-free and quota-free. The latter two are particularly significant because decided and often highly emotional disagreement on agricultural issues as well as the wide divide between economically developing and developed nations had threatened to make Hong Kong a failure, as they had previously in Seattle and Cancun. What's more, "Hong Kong heightened pressure on the European Union to move further in opening up access to its agricultural market, which is an absolute prerequisite to moving ahead," said NAM's Engler. "We all know the path to cutting manufactured goods barriers goes through agriculture."

Engler is correct to say there's "a lot of heavy lifting ahead." As U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman indicated at the end of the Hong Kong meeting, there's the need for more market access in agriculture, a reduction of tariffs and non-tariff barriers in manufacturing, and new rules for trade in services. There are investment and intellectual property issues yet to be resolved as well. There is no assurance that the Doha Round will be completed with all the items on its ambitious agenda agreed upon.

Some of the hard-lining that continues to go on among the 149 WTO members is posturing. Very few nations bargain from positions of weakness, especially when the stakes are so high. But nearly a dozen trade negotiating rounds since the late-1940s under the WTO and the GATT have also changed the trading world, making it both more sophisticated and complicated. "This conference made it clear that there is a consensus among countries rich and poor, North and South, [and] large and small that more open trade is the road to prosperity. This is an important consensus because there are tough decisions to make," said U.S. Trade Representative Portman on Dec. 19.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

 John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.
      
      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).
      
      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.
      
      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”
      
      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.
      
      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
      

 

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