It is now a little under a month until trade ministers meet in Hong Kong with the hope of advancing the ambitious Doha Development Round. Unfortunately, the timetable for concluding the round has not been met.
The failure to get some progress and momentum for the round at Cancun, Mexico, when that ministerial conference collapsed, cost the global economy at least two years. Talks on key agricultural issues did not advance in Geneva last week.
However, this is not the end of the world; ministerial meetings have failed to agree before. It shows how important the World Trade Organisation is to the global economy. These conferences are real; the decisions are binding upon governments, and where there are differences in interpretation of agreements, there is a binding disputes-settlement system.
That is unique in the international architecture. Because these agreements must all be ratified by parliaments and congresses, ministers must carry their governments with them. Nowadays, ministers often have more difficulty negotiating with domestic interests than with their ministerial counterparts.
WTO ministerial meetings are different. Truthfully, nothing much comes out of international meetings of ministers of social welfare, labour or the environment. That is why it is easy for them to meet, agree, fudge and go home unnoticed. The Hong Kong meeting is vital if the benefits of the Doha Round are to be shared over the next few years.
Several key ministers met recently in London, and nearly 30 assembled last Tuesday in Geneva. The reports were not good: talk was of lowering ambitions, increasing the timeline and widening the agenda. International institutions like the WTO do not fail; they just adjust their objectives to meet the lack of results.
Neither the world economy nor the global trading system can afford the rejection of multilateralism, the WTO or the Doha Round. Leaders cannot afford to walk away from the ambitions of trade liberalisation agreed to at Doha when I was WTO director-general.
