The World

By Alan Beattie, world trade editor

It looks like my decision not to go to Geneva for the WTO ministerial was vindicated. The only real debate in Geneva was about whether and when to have the next meeting, suggesting that the machinery has become largely detached from the function. Someone on the world trade circuit once told me that the perfect catch-all news headline for international meetings was “Group Mulls Action – Talks Continue”, and it’s performed pretty well for the first eight years of the Doha round, during which time the world has changed.

I’ve long thought it was time to take a few issues – perhaps all services, perhaps “green goods” like wind turbines and so on – and try for some standalone plurilateral deal with a smaller group of countries. It’s not as good as multilateralism,  but it’s better than bilateralism, and the WTO system needs to show some wins.

Trade is not an isolated example. Currency valuations, economic imbalances, carbon emissions – there are a whole bunch of really quite important issues on which global agreement is proving elusive. My longer take on the reasons why is here, but the fundamental problem is that too many governments see international institutions either as a means for projecting their views on the world (such as the US perpetually trying to use the IMF as a halberd to wave menacingly at China over their currency) or to solve their problems for them (such as chucking the whole carbon issue into the Copenhagen process).

What do we learn from this? It’s not the global mechanisms that are wonky. It’s the weakness of the national governments pulling the levers. This would be as true of a plurilateral trade deal as of a multilateral, of course. There is no technocratic solution to the Doha round. It’s a political problem.