The architect of the Doha development round of trade talks has said it would “break the heart of the world” if the Doha agenda is not implemented.
Mike Moore, who was director-general of the World Trade Organization when the Doha round was launched, said: “It would be a great folly to declare the Doha round dead. You’ll never get it up again.” He said that the scope of the Doha round should be increased, without abandoning the original agenda.
“We have to keep Doha, and widen it to represent the new realities of the economy,” said Moore, also former prime minister of New Zealand. “We must face 21st-century issues, but not at the expense of 20th-century issues.”
Others backed his claim. “We will literally be crying because we didn’t complete Doha,” said Ernesto Zedillo, director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and former president of Mexico.
“We will regret that the Doha agenda, which is not only about agricultural and non-agricultural products but about discipline in other aspects of international trade, has not been fulfilled.” But he agreed the agenda needed to be modified.
Arvind Subramanian, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said a new agenda is needed, reflecting the influence of China on the world economy.
“No emerging country wants to take down its tariffs when China has its undervalued exchange rate,” he said. “The big development in the trading system is the rise of China, and it’s potentially a threat, which I think we have to respond to. Essentially we need a new China round of trade negotiations that can take on board the Doha round.”
Zedillo said that any trade agenda had to focus on agriculture, which was a driving element of the Doha round. “Agriculture today is more important than 10 years ago, because we are creating new middle classes in the world that want to be fed better, and we face demand for food that we have not faced before in history,” he said. “We need the market economy to provide solutions to that.”
He bemoaned the “rich countries [that] complain and accuse developing countries for demanding special and differential treatment”. The rich countries had in fact invented preferential treatment, for themselves, on agriculture in the past, he argued.
“We will not be able to feed the millions of people that will be living in the next years if we don’t get serious about agriculture,” he said.
Zedillo also called for greater discipline on preferential trade agreements – or “discriminatory trade agreements”, as he called them. “I want a rule-based, reciprocal, universal, zero-tariffs system. That’s the best system for humanity,” he said.
And he warned of the perils of neglecting trade imbalances. “Fundamentally, trade is about international peace and security,” he said. “Economic incompetence can destroy geopolitics and put at risk that international peace and security,” he said.