Peter Gallagher

Geoff Kit­ney in today’s AFR wants you to believe Mark Emer­son has “res­cued the Doha round of trade nego­ti­a­tions from col­lapse” by con­vinc­ing all other Mem­bers to adopt his/Julia’s plan to “keep the talks alive”.

Con­trast that breath­less dis­patch with this from Reuters: “WTO Meet­ing Ends with No Move For­ward on Doha”. Or how about this from the Indian Busi­ness Stan­dard newspaper

On the work ahead, while a num­ber of min­is­ters empha­sised their open­ness to dif­fer­ent nego­ti­at­ing approaches, some expressed strong reser­va­tions about pluri­lat­eral approaches. Many mem­bers —accord­ing to Lamy — stressed that any dif­fer­ent approaches in the work ahead should con­form to the Doha man­date, respect the sin­gle under­tak­ing, and be truly mul­ti­lat­eral, trans­par­ent and inclusive.

Hmmm… The AFR must have noticed a mir­a­cle that escaped the notice of every­one else.

Time will tell, but my money’s on the obser­va­tion by the Chair­man of the talks who said there were “sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives on the pos­si­ble results that Mem­bers can achieve in cer­tain areas [of the allegedly undead negotiations].”

Looks like Alan Beat­tie in the Finan­cial Times agrees with me.

The WTO itself is being extra­or­di­nar­ily coy. No sign yet of the Meet­ing Chairman’s state­ment on their web­site, a day later.