Doha Trade Round: Bono, Geldof go AWOL as Irish Government hides in France's shadow

international | miscellaneous | other press Tuesday November 15, 2005 00:31 by Michael Hennigan - Finfacts.com finfacts at finfacts dot ie

Blair challenges rich countries to see "past a narrow view of self-interest"

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair warned in a speech in London on Monday night that rich countries should see "past a narrow view of self-interest" in the current Doha Round trade talks and not allow "differences over support for agriculture...to block an agreement that could give renewed hope to the 1 in 5 people in the world living on less than $1 a day."

French President Jacques Chirac has threatened to veto European Union concessions and his stance has been supported by Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern.

Last week expectations that the current Doha trade round talks would result in an agreement on ambitous reform at next month's ministerial meeting of the 148 nation World Trade Organization in Hong Kong, floundered (It was announced on Friday Nov. 11th that Saudi Arabia will become the 149th member of the WTO in December) .

This week also the World Bank published a research study which says that abolition of tariffs, subsidies and domestic support programs would boost global welfare by nearly $300 billion per year by 2015. Close to two-thirds of these gains would come from agricultural trade reform, because agriculture is so much more distorted than other sectors.

Within agriculture, market access barriers are the key. Deep reductions in agricultural tariffs would deliver 12 times the gains that would be achieved by abolishing export subsidies and trade-distorting domestic support to agriculture,” said Will Martin, Lead Economist in the Bank’s trade research group and the study’s co-editor. “Making agricultural markets more accessible is the most fundamental reform that needs to emerge from the Doha round of WTO negotiations.”

The study also emphasizes that cuts to tariffs can be deceptive because the reductions are in bound tariffs, which are legal ceilings or limits, and not to the tariffs actually applied. To bring the average global applied agricultural tariff down by one-third, the study recommends cuts of at least 75 percent in the highest bound tariffs.

The opposition of the EU to deep cuts to its tariffs gives major Developing Countries such as India, which has average farm tariffs of 114 percent, an excuse to keep their markets closed.

In Ireland, the impending collapse of the trade talks was a non-issue. The Government which has been happy to leave France take the lead in preventing the European Union from making a credible response to the tariff reduction proposals of the United States, had nothing to say. Opposition politicians also had nothing to say and IBEC, the principal business lobby group, in a country where 90% of manufacturing exports are made by foreign firms, had nothing to say. Many high profile economists have also remained silent.

Irish rock stars Bono and Bob Geldof who led a campaign last summer to pressure the leaders of the G8 countries to agree to writing off the debts of poor countries, also were AWOL even though the long term impact of the trade talks will be much more critical than the write-off of debts that were never going to be paid.

In London this week, Chinese Commerce Minister Bo Xilai signed an agreement on Chinese textile exports to the US with US Trade Representative Rob Portman. Bo used an old Chinese saying that the "crying baby gets the milk first."

Bo could have been talking about the Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) and its leader John Dillon, who demonstrated outside the European Commission's office in Dublin and called for EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, who was dubbed as Tony Blair's "lapdog," to be sacked.

The Trappists of Vested Interest have handed the public megaphone to the representatives of big farming.

Click on link for background on alternative proposals from EU and the surprising alignment of the US with Developing Countries: