Rio De Janeiro, Brazil – The United States and Brazil will look for ways this weekend to bridge bitter divisions between rich and poor nations that led to the collapse of trade liberalization talks, Washington’s chief trade negotiator said Friday.
Speaking the day before a hastily arranged meeting Saturday with Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said the two nations could help pave the way for a resumption of the Doha round of World Trade Organization.
But Schwab also acknowledged that it may be nearly impossible to get the talks back on track.
“We can both be winners or we can both be losers, but there is no scenario in which one of us can win and one of us can lose,” Schwab told reporters here.
Schwab said she and Amorim would try to determine why the talks in Geneva broke down this week, and whether there is any chance of rich nations and developing countries giving ground on the key stumbling blocks of farm subsidies and market access.
“Think of it as creative brainstorming,” she said. “How do we get to yes, how do we get to convergence if convergence is possible.” Schwab made the comments a day after WTO chief Pascal Lamy urged the organization’s members to avoid playing the “blame game” over the collapse of Doha round of talks, named after the capital of Qatar where the negotiations started five years ago.
Lamy was apparently referring to the European Union and the United States, which have spent much of this week blaming each other.
The EU says Washington derailed the talks by not offering deeper cuts in subsidies paid to farmers. The United States, meanwhile, attacked Europe for declining to ease foreign access to its agricultural markets.
The Doha round aimed to boost the global economy by lowering trade barriers across all sectors, with particular emphasis on helping poorer countries develop their economies through export growth.
The talks were supposed to address the concerns of poorer countries, which claimed that the international trading system was weighted against them because rich nations’ farm markets remained highly protected.
Schwab said the United States still thinks a deal is possible, but that it could take anywhere from months to years to set up key ministerial meetings among the WTO’s 149 member nations to push the process forward.
Lamy – the WTO director-general – suspended the negotiations Monday after a meeting of ministers from the United States, the EU, Japan, Australia, India and Brazil made it clear that differences over farm subsidies were unbridgeable.
