Sept 16: The fifth Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) collapsed on Monday due to a serious rift between developed and developing nations that could not be bridged with rich nations refusing to show flexibility in their approach to the negotiations. This is the second ministerial meeting-level failure in four years. The first time the talks had failed was at Seattle, US, in 1999.


The six-para Ministerial Statement issued at the end of the meeting at Cancun said that the ministers now "instruct" their officials to continue working on outstanding issues with a renewed sense of urgency and purpose and taking fully into account all the views expressed in this conference.

The General Council Chairman of WTO will now convene a meeting of the General Council of the WTO at the officers' level before December 15, 2003 to help the Doha negotiations conclude before the mandated date of December 2004.


Commerce and Industry Minister Arun Jaitley said the talks at the Mexican beach resort had failed because the draft Ministerial Declaration circulated for adoption at the meeting failed to represent the concerns of the large number of developing countries in the WTO. He however, said that "there is no last day" in negotiations and the threads will now be picked up in Geneva for further consultations and negotiations.


The developed nations, were however, very critical of the developing countries for not accepting the unbalanced draft released at around 1 pm on Saturday which went against the interests of the poorer nations. WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi said he was disappointed but not discouraged.


The collapse of the trade talks is an indication of developing countries coming of age at the multilateral trade talks which till date have been dominated by the developed country negotiators who had better negotiating skills. But for the first time, the developing countries, especially the G 22 on agricultural issues, grouped themselves together to take on the developed countries on every aspect of negotiations - preparing the base documents to posturing and presenting logical reasons for adopting their stand.

The conference, which was hanging in balance when the "green room" process of negotiations on issues began at 8.30 am on Sunday collapsed at 3 pm after the least developed and countries decided to walk out of the meeting when the developed nations refused to remove the contentious Singapore issues - investment, competition policy, trade facilitation and transparency in government procurement - out of the WTO agenda.

What is important to note as countries will pick up the threads of the Doha Agenda will be that the 148 countries can easily leave out investment and competition policy out of the negotiating mandate.

EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, it is learnt, had agreed to remove both investment and competition policy and was willing to reconsider transparency in government procurement to remove it from the WTO agenda itself.

Therefore, with those making this demand themselves conceding removal, they will have no moral right to put it back on the agenda. India, the minister said, was continuously proactive in the negotiations and had put forward some very constructive suggestions to improve the unacceptable draft that was circulated by the WTO secretariat.
He said the G-22 countries had also behaved with immense amount of maturity at the negotiations and had put forward some very useful points for negotiations and had stayed from making rhetorical statements. If the talks had not failed it was likely that India would have managed a major scoop in terms of getting a majority of Singapore issues out of the WTO agenda and also gaining some access in the agricultural markets in the developed world.

The Doha Development Agenda now needs a major push by all countries to be put back on track. But for the multilateral process to succeed the developed countries will have to realise that the developing nations cannot be taken for granted and the deal has to be fair.