World trade talks fail
source: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL747098220080729
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"We were so close to getting this done," U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told reporters at World Trade Organization headquarters after countries failed to compromise over measure to protect farmers in poor countries.
"The U.S. remains committed to the Doha round. This is not a time to talk about a round collapsing," said Schwab, who looked frustrated and distressed. "The U.S. commitments remain on the table, awaiting reciprocal responses."
As failure looked likely, New Zealand's trade minister, Phil Goff, held out hope for Doha talks continuing at a later date. "I hope ... that what we've achieved this week can be used at least to build on as a foundation for the future," he said.
However failure of the talks to find a broad agreement on the Doha trade round, could delay any global agreement on trade liberalization for several more years, experts say.
The negotiations for a global deal trade began in 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks on the United States, in the hope of boosting the world economy and helping poor countries.
They have lurched from crisis to crisis and risk further years of delay without a breakthrough now because of the U.S. presidential election in November and other factors.
Washington had opposed a push from India, China and Indonesia to secure measures to protect their farmers if faced with sudden surges of cheap farm imports.
Earlier, European Union Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson urged parties to seek compromise. "If people don't want this deal, there's no better deal coming along and we just have to consider, if this fails, what they will lose," he said.
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- tags:
- World Trade, Geneva Talks
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Hawkmang
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Ron Paul said it best, with a little help from Frédéric Bastiat. Here is quote from pg. 94 of his most recent book, "The Revolution: A Manifesto":
"Prosperity comes not just from economic freedom at home, but also from the freedom to trade abroad. If free trade were not beneficial, it would make sense for us to 'protect jobs' by buying only those goods produced entirely in our own towns. Or we could purchase only those goods produced on the streets where we live. Better still, we could restrict our purchases to things produced in our own households, buying all our products only from our own immediate family members. When the logic of trade restriction is taken to its natural conclusion, its impoverishing effects become too obvious to miss.
Frédéric Bastiat once wrote a satirical petition to the French parliament on behalf of candlemakers and related industries. He was seeking relief from 'ruinous competition of a foreign rival who works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it an an incredibly low price.' The 'foreign rival' he was speaking of was the sun, which was unfairly giving away light for free. The relief sought was a law requiring the closing of all blinds to shut out the sunlight and thereby stimulate the domestic candle industry. That is what so many fallacious arguments against free trade amount to.
In spite of my strong support for free trade, I have felt compelled to oppose many of the trade agreements that have appeared in recent years. For instance, although I was not in Congress at the time, I opposed both the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, both of which were heavily favored by the political establishment. Initial grounds for suspicion was the sheer length of the text of these agreements: no free-trade agreement needs to be 20,000 pages long."
- 3 years ago
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Hawkmang
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explore2learn
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Some officials had described this meeting at the WTO's Geneva headquarters as a last chance for the Doha trade round, noting that the US and other national elections would make negotiations difficult over the next couple of years.
A number of officials described the debate between the US and China and India as one of principle, and not just economics.
Others blamed a lack of courage for the standoff.
"It is a jump in the dark," Celso Amorim, the Brazilian foreign minister, said before final efforts were made on Tuesday.
"You can't calculate until the very last situation all the hypotheses. If you do that [the round], will never finish.
"It will take two years, three years. It will probably be for a new generation," Amorim said.
The issue concerned a "special safeguard" developing countries, led by China and India, have demanded to deal with a sudden surge of imports or a drop in prices.
While farm import safeguards currently exist in rich and poor countries, they are rarely used. The dispute over the proposals concerns the threshold for when developing nations could raise their tariffs, and how high those taxes could rise.
The US had accused the two emerging powers of insisting on allowances to raise farm tariffs above even their current levels.
That violates the spirit of the trade round, the US and other agricultural exporters argued, because it is supposed to help poorer countries develop their economies by boosting their exports of farm produce.
- 3 years ago
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explore2learn
