Failure of Doha Talks Disappoints Germans

As the World Trade Organization's Doha round negotiations on fairer global trade stalled on Monday night after a crunch meeting of six key players in Geneva, Germans are concerned about the impact the failure of the talks could have on developing countries, as well as the export industry here.

They're mainly placing the blame on the United States and are defending the offers made by the European Union.

WTO negotiators weren't able to settle their spats over Washington's refusal to offer more cuts in its contested subsidies to domestic farmers unless others reduced their own import duties on agricultural goods.

West unwilling to make concessions

"There's so much at stake for the developing countries," said Susanne Droege from the German Institute for Economic Research. "We can't detect any genuine willingness on the part of the wealthy nations to make more concessions, particularly in the field of agriculture."

The same can be said about the services sector, she added, "where the west has been raising the stakes for the poorer nations without offering anything substantial in return."

Droege said she thinks negotiators will take many months to find a basis on which to get the talks going again. She added that none of the western negotiators, including the European Union, went far enough to ensure the success of the talks by making agreements acceptable to poorer nations.

"Conditions have to be fair"

"It's not the opening of markets and market access alone that makes people richer," said Friedrich Wilhelm Graefe zu Baringdorf, vice-president of the EU's agriculture committee. "Trade alone doesn't necessarily lead to more prosperity for all players involved. It certainly fills the pockets of multi-national companies."

Graefe zu Baringdorf said the conditions in which developing countries are able to export to the industrialized world are more important, "and these conditions have to be fair. Developing countries should be able to export at EU or US price levels. If the west is only out to make a killing, the developing countries' negotiators are now organized well enough to say 'Thanks guys, that's not a deal!'"

The German Association of Wholesale and Foreign Trade criticized the failure of Monday's talks, saying that a further liberalization of global trade relations was now completely out of sight.

It called on Germany and the EU as a whole to make more bilateral deals with interested partners in the developing world so as not to yield the ground completely to such countries as China and India.

A severe blow to the developing world

The president of the German farmers' association, Gerd Sonnleitner, said the United States had at been willing to arrive at a sustainable solution at any point during the talks. No result, he concluded, was better than a bad compromise.

German development minister Heidemarie Wiezcorek-Zeul added that the failure of the talks was a severe blow to the developing world.

Many poorer nations, she said, are dependent on agriculture as an important source of employment and export earnings. For them it would be particularly vital to resume negotiations at a later stage, perhaps after six months of reflection.