Peter Gallagher

The Direc­tor gen­eral of WTO is report­edly threat­en­ing Ambas­sadors in Geneva with direct action. bq. Supachai Pan­itch­pakdi, director-general of the World Trade Organ­i­sa­tion, will take a more aggres­sive approach to chivvy gov­ern­ments into mak­ing progress in the stalled Doha world trade talks. bq. He said that unless WTO mem­bers’ nego­tia­tors showed more flex­i­bil­ity, he would go over their heads and deal directly with their min­is­ters. (“Finan­cial Times”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1073281284197&p=1012571727179) Expe­ri­ence gives us no rea­son to believe that that Min­is­ters will be ‘more flex­i­ble’. There were dozens of Min­is­te­r­ial level con­sul­ta­tions and infor­mal meet­ings lead­ing to the abortive Can­cZn meet­ing. None of them indi­vid­u­ally or in aggre­gate pro­duced the nec­es­sary agreement.