WTO's Lamy says Doha round relaunch awaits U.S.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A renewed push to finish long-running world trade talks cannot begin until the United States is ready to engage, the head of the World Trade Organization said on Friday.
Completing the Doha round of talks would help pull the global economy out of recession by unleashing new trade flows and "help restore confidence at this moment of crisis," Pascal Lamy, the WTO's director general, said at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
"I cannot restart a political process without the U.S. being ready," Lamy said. That opportunity could come at a number of international meetings over the next several months.
The Obama administration's position on the Doha round of trade talks "is emerging little by little" and is positive but the process has been slow, Lamy said. if (There is much goodwill among negotiators in Geneva for the new U.S. administration but patience is not infinite, he said.
The talks, officially known as the Doha Development Agenda, were launched more than seven years ago in the capital of Qatar with the goal of helping poor countries prosper through trade.
Many developing countries, who make up of the majority of the WTO's 153 members, are anxious for the talks to conclude.
They stand to benefit if rich countries make long-awaited farm subsidy cuts and open their manufacturing and agricultural markets to more imports from developing nations, Lamy said.
U.S. farm, manufacturing and services groups strongly object to a set of proposed texts for concluding the round put forward in December. They have urged the Obama administration to refuse to restart talks on the basis of those texts.
U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said on Thursday the United States remains committed to a successful end of the round but needs a better idea of what it will "get" in exchange for what it gives up. Kirk said the United States would soon set out new ideas for moving the talks forward.
LAMY TO MEET KIRK
Lamy, in Washington for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is expected to meet Kirk.
Lamy argued that U.S. business already would benefit more from the round than it publicly admits.
If the United States wants developing countries to clarify what new market openings they will make, it would help for Washington to identify which goods it will exclude from a pledge rich countries made in 2005 not to impose duties or quota on imports from the poorest countries, Lamy said.
Developing countries fear the United States will use its insistence on excluding 3 percent of products from the duty-free, quota-free pledge to maintain barriers in areas of greatest interest to them, such as textiles and sugar.
Sounding a warning against protectionism, Lamy said he has hung a picture in his office of the two U.S. lawmakers who authored the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff act often blamed for deepening and prolonging the Great Depression by triggering tit-for-tat retaliation around the globe.
But that trauma led to the rules-based world trading system that has provided "more than 60 years of economic stability," Lamy said.
(Editing by John O'Callaghan)
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