At the end of the week-long ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Hong Kong, the Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations is still breathing, but only just. The ministers have kept it on life support. But negotiators will have to resuscitate early in the new year.
The price of avoiding overt failure has been minimal progress. The ministers have done little more than endorse a modest package of trade and aid measures. Rich nations have promised to reduce restrictions on imports from least developed countries and to increase technical assistance. The European Union reluctantly agreed to set 2013 as the deadline for phasing out farm export subsidies. But next to no progress has been made on market access, the heart of any multilateral trade negotiation. This must now change. The US administration's trade promotion authority expires in July 2007. Given this, substantive negotiations in the round will need to be completed by the end of next year. This, in turn, means that agreement on the modalities of the negotiations must be reached by April 2006, at the latest.
The relatively small number of players with markets worth accessing must be far more forthcoming. If the EU is treated as one entity, there are no more than 25 such players. They include big developing countries, such as China, India and Brazil. China at least made substantial commitments when it joined the WTO. Others have much left to offer. They will have to make substantial offers in services and manufactures. But the EU in particular must also offer vastly improved market access in agriculture. Only an ambitious package has any hope of passing political muster around the globe.
It is also desirable to offer something credible to poor small developing countries. Protection-free market access for the least developed is the least they deserve. It is a scandal that the US Congress resists this. It is equally shocking that it cannot stop subsidising US cotton farmers at the expense of poor west African producers.
But developing countries that have little to offer - and even less they wish to offer - cannot be allowed to hold the negotiations to ransom. Many have fallen prey to economically illiterate arguments advanced by non-government organisations. Some of these false friends have even appeared as negotiators, determined to protect the high-cost domestic services, internationally uncompetitive manufactures and corrupt monopolies that impoverish their own peoples. They risk making the WTO as ineffective as Unctad.
Negotiations involve those able and willing to offer something worth having. The number of such players is not huge. But they must all now become engaged. If they do not, the round will fail. The consequence of that would likely be the slow death of the liberalism the world has already achieved. It is one only idiots would welcome.