Peter Gallagher

The Doha nego­ti­a­tions are mori­bund because they’ve been poi­soned by their own intestines. The guts of the deal is in the so-called ‘modal­i­ties’: now a knotty mass of rules for cut­ting bar­ri­ers, rules for com­pen­sat­ing the bar­rier cuts, rules for mak­ing excep­tions to the bar­rier cuts, and­pro­vi­sions adding excep­tions to the excep­tions. They add-up to hun­dreds of pages includ­ing gobbledy-gook so impen­e­tra­ble that most gov­ern­ments have no idea what it will mean for actual imports and exports. That’s a major rea­son the talks have ground to a halt.

Worse, it’s not hard to see that in sev­eral ways this minutely-structured deal pro­longs and con­sol­i­dates the con­ta­gion of tailor-made pro­tec­tion that it was sup­posed to remedy.

A much more effec­tive ‘two track’ solu­tion would be to allow the WTO mem­ber coun­tries to ‘self select’ into two groups. One group would bring together coun­tries that wanted to open global mar­kets open com­pe­ti­tion and higher growth with fewer gov­ern­ment taxes and sub­si­dies. They would try to nego­ti­ate a rec­i­p­ro­cal deal to open mar­kets on a non-discriminatory basis.

The other group, includ­ing many devel­op­ing coun­tries such as India that don’t want to open their mar­kets and see the WTO rules as a pro­tec­tion for their trade auton­omy (they are that, too), would not nego­ti­ate. But nei­ther would they have the right to impose unwieldy, com­plex, recidi­vist con­di­tions on the deal made by the first group.

I have recently been work­ing on the out­lines of just such a two-track deal using a non-discriminatory form of a kind of trade deal known as a ‘crit­i­cal mass’ agree­ment. I’ve been mod­el­ing the out­comes of some pos­si­ble deals and com­par­ing them to a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what could come out of Doha as it is presently struc­tured. As part of the mod­el­ing, I have con­structed some lists of the devel­op­ing coun­try groups that have extracted var­i­ous addi­tional excep­tions and concessions—beyond the ‘spe­cial and dif­fer­en­tial’ con­ces­sions made to the entire devel­op­ing coun­try group—including the right to make no changes to their trade barriers.

As an exam­ple of the bizarre con­tor­tions that these excep­tions processes have included, note that the second-biggest econ­omy in Africa and the biggest oil-producer on the African con­ti­nent, Nige­ria, has been offered the ‘small and vul­ner­a­ble’ des­ig­na­tion (foot­note 11 of the cur­rent Agri­cul­ture ‘modalities’).