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EU Trade Policy: EUC Report

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Cohen, on securing this debate on a very important matter. Like her, I thank those who gave evidence to the committee, and its staff and advisers. It has helped us enormously through a very difficult area. As the noble Baroness has said, the Doha round started in 2001. Last year, there were hopes that that might have been concluded but it has still not been concluded. It has gone on for a long time and, while one would like to be optimistic that it will be concluded, for various reasons which the noble Baroness gave there cannot be a great deal of optimism that it will. It may not be a bad idea to reflect on the structural problems of the WTO. One of the things that we enjoyed most on our visit to the headquarters of the WTO was discovering a diagram that Pascal Lamy has to guide him through the various groupings. All the countries count as one, but there are others, and if noble Lords have not done this before, I urge them to pick up the report and turn to page 13, which they can get a glimpse of from here as I hold it up. It has lots of lovely coloured circles around the various groupings in the WTO. There are about 13 of them. We have a G1, a G10, a G20 and a G90. There are others as well. We welcome the fact that this organisation includes so many countries, but by doing so it creates difficulties in reaching unanimity. In the past, this was not a huge problem because the United States and the European Union dominated world trade and the WTO, but that is in the past and quite different structures have now arisen. People refer in this context to the BRICs: Brazil, India, China and Russia. I am not quite sure why Russia has been included because I am not sure that it carries as much significance as the others, but it helps to round out the acronym.