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SUMMARY
GOVERNMENTS should
prepare to re-launch the Doha Round negotiations in 2005 at the
World Trade Organization’s ministerial conference in Hong Kong and
aim to complete them early in 2007, Clayton Yeutter urged at a
roundtable meeting of the Cordell Hull Institute in Washington on
November 25, 2003.
Ambassador Yeutter
said that the Doha Round negotiations cannot be completed in a U.S.
election year if the results are to be meaningful. The WTO General
Council must acknowledge that reality now and plan accordingly.
Otherwise, he added, the negotiations will be in even more trouble
when U.S. “fast track” negotiating authority is up for extension
early in 2005. The Hong Kong ministerial should therefore be held in
July 2005 or thereabouts – after the authority has been extended.
The former U.S.
Secretary of Agriculture and onetime U.S. Trade Representatives, who
played a major role in the Uruguay Round negotiations, reviewed the
options in the stalled WTO negotiations at the Institute’s meeting,
which concluded a series on the Cancún debacle.
Click here
for the papers discussed at the
meeting. The papers are covered in a
short report
(HTML) here in the Policy Forum section.
Mark Vaile,
Australia’s Minister for Trade, who is chairman of the Cairns Group
of agricultural-exporting countries, also spoke at the meeting.
Other papers were
given by Rubens Barbosa, the Brazilian Ambassador to the United
States; Harald Malmgren, former Deputy U.S. Trade Representative;
Edward Menzies, President of the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance,
Ottawa, and Andrew Stoeckel, Executive Director of the Centre for
International Economics, Canberra. |
