The World Trade Organization’s general council quietly announced last week that its 153 member countries had agreed to hold a full ministerial conference at the WTO’s Geneva headquarters from Nov. 30 to Dec. 2. Mario Matus, Chile’s ambassador to the WTO, who chairs the general council, explained when the council met on May 26 that the WTO’s rules call for such ministerial meetings every two years, but that it had been nearly four years since the last formal ministerial meetings were held in Hong Kong in Nov/Dec. 2005. This will be a “regular” ministerial conference, Matus said. “I would like to stress the word ‘regular,’ as it has also become clear that this Conference is not intended to be a negotiating session — the DDA are on a separate track.” [DDA is the acronym for the so-called Doha Development Round of multilateral negotiations aimed at slashing tariffs and subsidies]

Talk about a looming PR disaster. Maybe Matus and other diplomats who are stationed in Geneva are naive enough to believe that WTO watchers will fall for the diplomatic doublespeak. Certainly, the hordes of journalists who will be swarming to Geneva to cover the ministerial meetings will be looking for only one piece of hard news: will the Doha negotiations succeed, or won’t they? After all, it was only last December that WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy announced that he would not call ministers to Geneva unless it appeared that a Doha deal was likely to be struck. Reporters have long memories for such contradictions. The Doha negotiations, which have dragged on since 2001, are by far, the most important business before the WTO — a fact that simply can’t be explained away by the general council. If the ministerial meetings conclude on Dec. 3 without convincing evidence of seriousness about successfully concluding the Doha negotiations, reporters will be filing stories asking questions like this: If the WTO’s members can’t find a way to make Doha work, why bother to meet?

Privately, some diplomatic insiders agree that the notion of holding a “regular” ministerial while the Doha negotiations are left hanging is risky business. “Our problem is, without real progress on Doha, it will look awkward,” says one key WTO diplomat. “It will look a little like navel gazing.”

But while some inside players who (understandably) ask not to be identified by name, say they are discouraged, others add that they believe that on Dec. 3, the ministers in Geneva could well be able to announce that the key deals to bring the Doha negotiations to a successful conclusion have been struck The idea is that, by lowering the expectations, space is being created for trade negotiators to reach understandings without the usual political posturing getting in the way. And for sure, there will be ample diplomatic opportunities between now and December to bridge the current gaps in the Doha process. Here’s the forthcoming diplomatic road map that reveals the agenda that could make Doha largely a done deal by the time of the ministerial meetings in Geneva.

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BALI, Indonesia-–What a difference a year makes. Last May, when some 3,000-plus members of the world’s financial elite — diplomats, finance ministers, central bankers, private bankers, private-equity mavens, bond traders, and the journalists who cover them — met in Madrid for the Asian Development Bank’s 41st annual meetings, the common thread that ran through the meetings was a bitter resentment against perceived high-handed American diplomacy. The board of governors for the ADB’s 67 member countries enthusiastically approved a strategy aiming to eradicate the remaining pockets of poverty in the region by 2020, proposing to double the multilateral lending institution’s $55 billion capitalization. While some ADB members including Switzerland, Australia, and the United Kingdom expressed reservations, basically questioning where the money would come from, the United States stood out conspicuously for refusing to vote for the so-called Strategy 2020. With Uncle Sam – and particularly the unilateralist-minded President George W. Bush – it’s always “my-way-or-the-highway,”went the anti-American refrain. That was Madrid, May, 2008. Continue reading →

SINGAPORE, April 29—Here in one of the world’s great international trading cities, watching CNN’s breathless coverage of the change that President Barack Obama has brought to America could be likened to eating a meal without the main course. Yes, there is a changed diplomatic tone in Washington (if no results yet) and a new economic environment associated with the president’s economic stimulus package (again, with no results yet), And there are promises of major changes to come, ranging from a dazzling array of big-ticket issues like health care, energy, climate change, and so on. But the main course, the one topic of real importance to any major trading crossroads like Singapore, involves international trade. On this, the television pundits have said almost nothing about where Obama is heading. Yet, the one question I’ve been asked the most since arriving here earlier this week is: What sort of change does Obama have in mind regarding his administration’s international trade agenda? And also this: What priority does the man who was elected promising that his administration would set policies based on the national interest, and not the narrower agendas of Washington’s famous protectionist lobbies, give to international trade?

Nobody knows the answers. Three months-and-counting into his term, nobody yet knows what Obama’s trade priorities really are, or where his administration is headed on trade. On one hand, the president and his top trade negotiator, Ron Kirk, seem to have begun to move away from some of the more embarrassing Obama protectionist campaign promises aimed at restricting trade flows, the most (in)famous of which was to threaten to abrogate NAFTA if the Canadians and Mexicans wouldn’t re-negotiate it to protect American jobs. But at the same time, others close to the administration, such as the red-hot protectionist Democrat from Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown, say they have come away from talks with the White House on the same subject, believing that the president is really on their side.

So does Leo Gerard, the president of the United Steelworkers. Gerard, who worked overtime to put Obama in the White House, has reason to think that he put the president in his pocket during the 2008 presidential campaign. Specifically, Gerard extracted a written promise that Obama, once in the White House, would be sympathetic to working with the steelworkers to roll back trade with China. And on April 20, Gerard and his Washington trade lawyer, Terrence Stewart, formally informed the president that they thought it was payback time. Now, one way or the other, the president will have to act. Either he will jump to the tune of the steel lobby, or he won’t. Specifically, the president will have to tell the world whether he is prepared to try to drive up the prices that American consumers pay for the tires they buy for their automobiles — and if he is prepared to slap on quotas to cap the amount of tires that Americans will be allowed to import from China.

Here’s what’s been going on, and what to watch for:

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