It’s not exactly liveblogging, but Peter Mandelson is posting daily updates from Geneva. It’s a bit informal and potentially interesting:

Word gets around that the Indian Commerce Minister Kamal Nath has arrived in Geneva fresh from the successful vote of confidence in the Indian Parliament that confirmed the Singh government. True to form, Nath immediately takes the opportunity to set out his stall in the morning Trade Negotiating Committee meeting. Nath goes straight on the attack; criticising the US’ offer to reduce farm subsidies and dismissing the idea of an Anti-Concentration Clause in industrial goods negotiations. Nath is playing to the gallery, and he is wrong when he suggests that such a clause would claw back many of the additional flexibilities that developing countries have fought to hard to include in the Doha package as a way of sheltering growing industry or protecting sensitive sectors.

Mandelson also says that “we are potentially closer than we have ever been to a deal.” Sadly, the European Commission hasn’t included a comments section on its website.

Sallie James doesn’t think Peter Mandelson is doing the Doha round many favors by arguing that “on agriculture, the EU will be the major net loser in any deal.”

See Patrick Messerlin on why Europe would benefit from an ag deal at Doha.

Pascal Lamy says that this weekend is a “moment of truth” for the Doha Round negotiations. Dozens of ministers are gathering in Geneva in a run-up to a meeting Monday. The G8 summit put out lots of “now is crucial” statements, but we’ve heard those so many times that Emmanuel dubbed Pascal Lamy to be Don Quixote.

Alan Winters says that the Doha Round agricultural negotiations are basically done, but all the other issues are far from a deal. He partly blames the large industrial lobbies’ loss of interest in WTO negotiations.

Addendum: Jeff Schott: “Dismiss the faint hopes of trade officials that the Doha Round can conclude in 2008. The window for doing so closed months ago.”

WTO:

Don Stephenson, the Chair of the Negotiating Group on Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA), said at a meeting of WTO members on 2 June 2008 that after a week of consultations with no progress he was suspending the meetings of the Group until members achieve some convergence.

Need a brief summary of where the WTO negotiations have been in the last decade? Track its journey across Seattle, Qatar, Cancun, Hong Kong, Geneva, and Potsdam in this short reflection paper on the WTO by Joe Guinan and Hugh Corbet.

Emmanuel:

It is ironic how Mode 4 has backfired on the US and to some extent the EU. Mode 4 was once seen as a way to extend the dominance of Western firms in service arenas. Now that LDCs are progressing smartly in services provision themselves, Mode 4 has become a “non-trade” issue according to the West. If Mode 4 speaks so little about trade, then why was it included in the GATS in the first place?

The surge in world food prices is accomplishing what seven years of trade talks haven’t: knocking down import barriers.

The Doha round of global trade negotiations has been stalled since 2001 because developing nations have refused to lower import tariffs that protect their farmers and rich countries won’t give up farm-price supports. Now, import duties are being slashed from Brazil to Burkina Faso in response to prices that the World Bank says have risen 83% the past three years; subsidies in the US and Europe are falling.

”Food prices have done for import liberalization what Doha wouldn’t have been able to achieve for a very long time,” says Arvind Subramanian, a trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

Maybe food prices will help Doha succeed and lock in such liberalization.

Robert Zoellick spoke at CGD a few days ago. Dani Rodrik summarizes:

So challenge number one is that world food prices are too high, but challenge number two is the need to get rid of developed country policies so that food prices can rise even more? …

The truth, I fear, is that Zoellick’s faith in trade agreements has little to do with the underlying economics and like many ideological free traders he is willing to latch on to the economic arguments only when they serve the cause (and to discard them just as easily when they no longer do).

As for the real impact of food prices on poverty, we can avoid much confusion by recognizing the diverse and heterogeneous effects that food prices have on poverty around the world.

Might high food prices make Doha round liberalisation more feasible? Some think so. Zoellick can’t have it both ways.

Peter Gallagher isn’t optimistic about the latest set of Doha proposals:

As a rule of thumb, simple deals open markets. The more complex the arrangements, the more likely they are to be ‘fine-tuned’ to minimize their impact on the beneficiaries of protection.

The sixty pages of complex ‘modalities’, conditions, exceptions, second-thoughts and jargon in this paper are likely to deliver much less reform than the ‘headline’ numbers suggest. The complexity of the proposals and of the protection regimes in many developed and developing economies means it’s impossible to be sure about the results without seeing the application of the proposals in detail to each market. But, working from the averages, it’s likely that these proposals will bring about, at most, modest changes and no commercial impacts in some key trades…

HT: Muse

FT:

Pascal Lamy, the director-general of the World Trade Organisation, insisted at the weekend that the politics were right to achieve a global trade deal this year.

I’ll believe it when I see it. Until then, Lamy is simply doing his job.