WASHINGTON: World Trade Organization chief Pascal Lamy and top US trade negotiator Susan Schwab held talks in Washington yesterday in an effort to restart the Doha Round of negotiations.
Lamy’s visit to the US capital comes on the heels of his trip to India last week to discuss the possibility of restarting the Doha Round after the collapse of ministerial talks in Geneva over a US-India impasse on agricultural protection.
India said it would return to global trade talks if the US signals it believes the deadlock can be broken.
Lamy, the WTO director general, and US Trade Representative Schwab had a private dinner late Thursday and were holding further talks yesterday morning, USTR spokeswoman Gretchen Hamel told AFP. The spokeswoman declined to reveal details of their meeting.
Lamy and others are trying to breathe new life into the moribund trade negotiations. Brazil, Latin America’s powerhouse, has been making efforts in recent weeks to revive the process. And World Bank President Robert Zoellick this week offered suggestions to break the deadlock over the proposed agricultural safeguard, saying it was critical for the world’s poor that the seven-year-old negotiations to lower trade barriers be successfully concluded.
Schwab, in an interview in a trade newsletter published on the eve of her meeting with Lamy, said the United States supports holding talks with senior officials from a small number of countries in September to explore the possibility of restarting the Doha Round.
Such an effort would help preserve the progress achieved during a failed July ministerial meeting and prevent its further erosion, she told Inside US Trade.
“We need to come to the table in September at the senior official level to test the seriousness of going forward, to bring forward new ideas to overcome some of the problems that we encountered in July that we were not able to overcome at that time, and quite frankly to stop the deterioration and the erosion of what was on the table in July,” Schwab was quoted as saying.
Schwab expressed hope that the September meeting could “clear the way, conceivably, for another round of ministerial engagement.”
