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No. 86 of 2013 

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2013   

 

   

Filed from Portland, Oregon  

     

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BALI, THE FINAL GENEVA PUSH - PART I

"It is all or nothing now.  We must tie the package up once and for all in the next few days."

Roberto Azev�do
November 12, 2013
CONTEXT
Director General Azev�do's remarks to the WTO's Trade Negotiations Committee earlier today were a pep talk, a report, and a briefing on what is to come, all wrapped up together.  To no one's surprise, he told the WTO members what surely all of them knew before the meeting started: "The risk of failure is still present."  And yet, he said, he is not yet ready to go to the fallback position of planning for a Ministerial Conference in Bali with no agreement.  This is how he put it:

"If we insist on today's hard deadline, then, at this point, we do not have a package.  However - I do not believe that that is what Members want.  I sense from members that they want to keep going; that we are too close to success to accept failure."

Along the way, the Director-General offered assessments of where things stand in different elements of the hoped-for Bali agreement.

Trade Facilitation is a mixed bag.  The agreement on the customs cooperation section is a major achievement, Mr. Azev�do said.  Success with respect to Section II of the Trade Facilitation agreement is another story.  That section deals with technical assistance and capacity building, and according to Director-General Azev�do, it "represents the biggest iceberg in our path."

Development.  Mr. Azev�do was relatively positive about progress on the issues that fall under this rubric.  In the case of cotton, for example, he said, "work is advancing."

Agriculture.  The Director-General described the members as "working in good faith" on the G33 proposal, but we found it hard to take away an upbeat message from this segment of his talk.  On tariff rate quotas, for example, he said, "no material progress has been achieved," and he described himself as "concerned about export competition."
COMMENT
Three things struck us in reading Mr. Azev�do's remarks from earlier today.

The first was what wasn't there.  He made no mention of the cross-linkages between those elements of the Bali package he discussed.   That's understandable.  His goal is to get an agreement, and publicly highlighting the bargaining with respect to Bali's elements would almost certainly have been counterproductive.  And yet, at some level, that is where the bargains need to be struck if there is to be a Bali package.
 
The second, was the deadline stated.  He didn't name the date, but he made it clear that there is a deadline for finishing the Bali negotiation, and it is not the 6th of December.  Here it is worth quoting the Director-General at length:

"But let me be clear: we cannot work right up until the wire.  Our deadline cannot be the start of the Ministerial Conference.  One of  the clearest messages from my consultations with Members is that Bali must not be a negotiating conference.  The duration of the flight would be enough for positions to become entrenched.  It would be the surest way to kill this agreement.  We have to close this in Geneva."

We are not quite sure why, but the reference to the long flight made us think of a favorite scene in the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Running from the law, the two train robbers are trapped on a ledge high above a mountain river.  Butch (Paul Newman) tell Sundance (Robert Redford) that they have to jump.  Sundance says, No.  He's afraid and confesses, "I can't swim."

Butch laughs: "Are you crazy?  The fall will probably kill you."

It doesn't, though.  They take the plunge and escape.  Let's hope that the members of the WTO in Geneva take the plunge as well, and reach an agreement this month in November.  The headline on the op-ed by Thomas Donohue in Politico yesterday sums up the situation pretty well: "It's Bali or bust for the WTO."

Finally, with respect to the Director-General himself, though our judgment is made from a distance, it seems to us that Roberto Azev�do is demonstrating remarkable leadership under very difficult circumstances.  We hope it pays off.

A note on numbering.  We called this "The Final Geneva Push - Part I."  We did that because we intend to say a little more about one aspect of this entry, namely, cotton.  We shall do that in the next TTALK Quote.
SOURCES & LINKS
The WTO is a link to the website of the World Trade Organization, where Mr. Azev�do's remarks today are prominently highlighted.

Before the Plunge is a clip of the scene from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" recalled above. 

Bali or Bust takes you to the article by Thomas Donohue mentioned above.  Mr. Donohue is president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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