The WTO feels compelled to put out press releases announcing that it won’t be doing anything significant soon.

Pascal Lamy seeks reappointment as WTO DG.

Richard Baldwin says that the financial crisis will make the gap between bound and applied rates pretty important:

National politicians, who have not had the wisdom to constrain themselves in the WTO, will find it almost irresistible to attempt to shift demand to local producers by raising tariffs on final goods.

On the bright side, this destructive protectionism will highlight the value of the tariff bindings that developing nations are offering in the Doha Round negotiations. So far, industrialised country exporters have turned their noses up at the tariff bindings offered by developing countries in the negotiation since they often don’t lower the actual tariff rates.

In financial terms, tariff bindings are options. The value of options rise with volatility—a fact that will become abundantly clear as recession spreads around the globe via trade accounts.

World leaders should seize the moment and “buy” these options now by finishing the Doha Round negotiations. This would send a great positive signal that they are aware that coordinated action is needed on the current account as well as the capital account.

Should, but won’t.

Again, I have seen far more warnings against protectionist reactions to the credit crisis than I have seen calls for such measures. Is all this preemption necessary?

Peter Mandelson is stepping down from his position as EU trade commissioner to become Labour’s business minister in the UK. His replacement, Catherine Margaret Ashton, has been a midlevel minister in various UK governments. Emmanuel notes that she’s relatively unknown, comparing her to Sarah Palin (now that’s a bit unfair, I think).

Richard Baldwin notes that most of the people working on the round won’t be around much longer:

By the time the new American administration is in place, Dame Ashton’s term at the commission will be up. By late 2009 the US and EU will be restarting negotiations with fresh talent and limited institutional memory. That’s reason enough to be pessimistic, but if the WTO does not renew the term of Pascal Lamy, its director-general, next year (or if he doesn’t want another term), then it may be time to kiss this round goodbye.

So in the midst of the financial crisis hullabaloo (Vox ran 16 columns in the last seven days!), I forgot to mention that Robert Baldwin has a way to make progress at Doha.

Remember the special safeguard squabble? It may be largely attributable to a crummy formula:

Trigger levels for the special agricultural safeguard mechanism under negotiation in the Doha Round are expressed simply as percentage increases in the volume of imports over the preceding three years or percentage decreases in a product’s import price compared to its monthly average over the preceding three years.

But the effect of a given percentage increase in the volume of imports on the livelihood conditions of domestic farmers varies greatly depending on the level of import penetration…

A much better trigger mechanism that distinguishes between when developing countries do and do not need additional import protection to maintain food security and livelihood conditions of their poor farmers is simply the percentage increase in imports divided by the average consumption of the product over a recent period…

With a measure that indicates changes in market access opportunities for farmers much more accurately than relative changes in the volume of imports alone, the issue of whether safeguard actions should be permitted to raise import duties above pre-Doha Round levels should no longer be of major concern.

The shame is that all parties now agree on the need for a special safeguard mechanism, and they broadly agree on what it should achieve. The particular formula they have chosen, however, is too blunt to distinguish between safeguarding fragile livelihoods and old-fashioned protectionism.

Enough to get the talks back on track? Maybe not, but it sounds like a major improvement over the current formula.

In Foreign Affairs, Fred Bergsten confirms my suggestion that he would be unhappy with the way China decided to actively engage the Doha round:

At the WTO ministerial meeting in Geneva in late July, China joined the organization’s inner steering committee for the first time. It seemed that China might be willing to help promote a fruitful outcome. But China, far from supporting liberalization, used its newfound clout to join India in seeking new protection beyond the red lines of most of the other participants, including many developing countries. Doha may thus become the first global trade negotiation to fail since the 1930s, when protectionism erupted everywhere and brought on a worldwide depression.

Sheila Mathrani blames Pascal Lamy for the collapse of WTO negotiations, arguing that he called in the ministers too early and favored developed countries’ negotiating priorities. In Lamy’s defense, it’s hard to see many other ways that he could have played the hand he was dealt.

The World Trade Organization has posted an “unofficial guide” (I wonder: who writes unofficial materials for the WTO?) to the stalemate over whether agricultural “safeguard” tariffs should be allowed to exceed Uruguay Round bound rates.

Alex Gadzala says that China played a role in the special safeguard mechanism stalemate that ended last week’s negotiations in Geneva. If China was really India’s co-equal in balking at the Quad’s position on SSM, as the IHT portrayed it, then the emerging power terribly disappointed those, like Fred Bergsten, who called for China to be an active participant in the round rather than playing a passive part. The fear was that China, having undergone significant liberalization and enjoying significant payoff from its 2001 accession, would have little impetus to push for further liberalization at the Doha round. Now, it seems, China has become an engaged stakeholder, but not as Bergsten & co. had hoped.

They’re done in Geneva.

Update: The WTO itself calls it a “collapse” and Pascal Lamy admits “this meeting has failed” (mp3).