There’s no joy in having predicted this outcome.
As explained (at some length) in my earlier post, I don’t believe that the draft agreement on the table represented anything like the ‘substantial improvement’ in global markets that was the goal of the Doha Declaration that launched the talks in 2001. There were too many status exceptions, category exceptions, and opportunities for manipulation.
But the repeated collapse of these negotiations is a blow to confidence in the ability of the global community and leadership to manage global commons like the world trading system and, for that matter, the global environment and climate (assuming the latter is a manageable commons).
The world community last agreed to open goods and services markets on the basis of compromises struck at the end of the 1980s. The centers of world wealth, economic and trade growth and even population growth have moved far since then. The management of global commons needs to move, too
Devices such as WTO’s ‘single undertaking’—that saw one huge set of complex rules applied in a monolithic way to all economies—no longer bridge the real differences in interests that, for the present and for some years to come, will affect agreements between the worlds largest economies. Giant, poor, ‘emerging’ economies such as China, India and Indonesia are making choices that cannot be accommodated in the framework WTO built in the 1980s.
We can no longer go on pretending that with further ‘tweaking’ of exceptions and concessions we can make their obligations and needs fit into the collaborative management framework. The framework is valuable; but it must change or it will continue to seize up—as it has this week—and be abandoned.
Its time to reengineer the processes of WTO.
The private abuse of copyright is considered in some industry—and 