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World Trade (Doha Development Agenda)

I share the pessimism and disappointment of my Committee colleagues about the current state of the WTO talks. Last year there was an unprecedented public and political campaign behind ““Make Poverty History””, and thanks to the lead taken by the Government we made substantial progress on debt and aid. However, unfortunately, on the third and most important issue—trade—we have signally failed to achieve what we aimed for. In the past two and half years, until June this year, I represented the British group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union on the WTO parliamentary conference. I listened to a lot of talking in that time and attended two ministerial conferences, in Cancun and Hong Kong. Frankly, apart from some progress that was made about six months after the Cancun conference, there has been little progress in the negotiations as a whole. Fundamentally there is little political momentum in the EU or the USA towards achieving significant progress. Some, including many non-governmental organisations, have argued that no deal is better than a bad deal, but no one should be under the illusion that nothing will change if no deal is reached. There is a real danger of regressing back into protectionism. The most vulnerable victims would be the world’s poorest. If that happens, the losses to the least developed countries will be much greater than those that have been modelled in the NGO reports. We must face the danger that the clock could be turned back, as well as being kept on hold for the next three years. That is why it is important that at this point the Government, with their EU partners, should closely examine the reasons for the problems and the underlying macro-economic dynamics that we need to address if we are to move the trade agenda forward in the next few years. History tells us that trade negotiations are normally long and drawn out. The Uruguay round took much longer, and did not start out with such an ambitious agenda in the first place. Unlike the current Doha round it was not burdened with such an altruistic political aspiration as alleviating global poverty, or with being the subject of debate by millions of ordinary citizens throughout the world. As my hon. Friend the Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) mentioned, the development agenda—the Doha round was launched in 2001—came as a consequence of international solidarity after the terrible events of 9/11 and a wake-up call in the international community about the global security threat to us all. However, it was a reaction to the events, rather than a fundamental shift in the political strategy behind trade liberalisation. In the grip of the need to address the causes of global instability, the language of the negotiations changed, so that development needs were seen to be put at the forefront. There was also an open acknowledgment of the need for a correction of the imbalance that had been created by the Uruguay round. However, there was a failure to emphasise that that could be a win-win agenda for all members, rich and poor.