Schwab urges new push for WTO deal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said on Friday that serious negotiations in world trade talks should resume in September to see whether a deal is still possible this year.
"There are quite a number of outstanding issues and therefore I encouraged the director general to convene senior officials sooner rather than later," Schwab told reporters by telephone after a meeting with World Trade Organization Director General Pascal Lamy.
Schwab said a deal in the nearly seven-year-old Doha round of world trade talks was "still conceivable" this year, despite a major collapse in the negotiations last month in Geneva.
"But it depends largely on the seriousness of purpose, commitment, flexibility of the key players, and grandstanding isn't going to do it," she said.
The nearly seven-year-old Doha round suffered a major setback last month when trade ministers from around 30 key WTO countries and the European Union failed again to agree on terms for cutting farm subsidies and tariffs and opening markets around the world to more manufactured goods trade.
The meeting collapsed when the United States was unable to bridge differences with China and India over the terms of a "special safeguard mechanism" to help developing countries protect their farmers from a surge in imports.
Lamy traveled to New Delhi earlier this month to explore possible avenues for restarting the talks.
"We all recognize there is a need, a legitimate need for a safeguard to address real surges and real emergencies," Schwab said. But "if misused or miswritten or abused (it) could end up having a devastating effect on global trade," she said.
Most of the day-to-day negotiations in the long-running trade round have been done by senior officials based in Geneva, with trade ministers gathering only rarely to try to make major decisions -- and usually without much success.
INDIA'S ROLE
India's role in the latest collapse has raised skepticism in the U.S. business community that New Delhi is really interested in a deal.
Schwab did not address that directly, but said perhaps the most important purpose of a meeting of senior officials would be to "give us a chance to test the seriousness of purpose of key players -- whether they are there to engage and solve problems or whether it's just a superficial political exercise."
The United States is prepared to go to Geneva with new ideas for resolving the safeguard issue and other outstanding concerns, Schwab said.
Another key priority is to lock in the substantial progress negotiators did make last month and to "staunch the hemorrhaging" that has occurred in certain areas, such as manufactured goods, since the talks collapsed, she said.
"We need to get to Geneva as responsible WTO members to at least attempt to stop (the deterioration), to reverse that and to build back toward a more ambitious outcome," Schwab said.
Most of the negotiations last month took place in the so-called G7 format which included the United States, the EU, India, China, Brazil, Japan and Australia.
Schwab seemed to indicate she thought a different group of countries would have a better chance of reaching agreement, but stopped short of saying who that group should include.
"Our sense is we need to have a representative group of countries that are ready, willing and able to engage in good faith to try to find an ambitious outcome to this round.
"And so I'll leave it up to the director general to decide who those participants should be, but that will have a bearing on the chances of success," Schwab said.
(Editing by Vicki Allen)
