The jury is still out whether the Doha Round of the WTO is a development round or not, observed the Brazilian and US ambassadors at a recent workshop on analysis of the Doha round of trade negotiations held at the WTO, Geneva on 2 November. At the concluding session moderated by the Director General, Pascal Lamy, ambassadors from China, India and EU strongly asserted that this is a development round. It was a candid assessment of the geopolitics of the trade and reflected the grim scenario that countries continue to speak to each other with each looking in different directions.

But the workshop was not only about geopolitics but also numbers. Many analysts opined that up to US$200bn could be added to global welfare by the current package of offers. More importantly, they contended that the world could see a 10 percent contraction in trade if Doha fails.

Numbers had little effect on the discussions by the key Ambassadors at the end of the workshop; what matters are the level of ambition and the balance of costs and benefits of the final deal. Jayant Dasgupta, the Indian Ambassador, succinctly summarised it by reminding the meeting of the old metaphor that it is time to enter a period of give and take negotiations and that it is no longer feasible to raise ambitions. I was speaking at the workshop on rules and environment, not too easy but certainly no hurdles in sewing up the Doha Round.

India has been playing a leading role in the Doha negotiations. The Indian trade minister, Anand Sharma, was recently at Geneva to test the waters and reaffirm India’s willingness to negotiate. India has not only been a part of the complex variable geometry of delegations meeting to thrash out differences and pull the negotiations out of its decade-old quagmire, it has taken a lead to pull them along when required.

India has contributed to the emergence of credible draft Chairs’ texts on agriculture and non-agriculture market access negotiations that lead to the last two most hope-generating efforts in July and December 2008. The efforts failed, though Lamy gives it 80 percent marks. In the fall of 2009, when appetite for a trade liberalisation deal was minimal in the wake of the financial crisis, India hosted a mini-ministerial where Lamy installed a roadmap for intense negotiations with capital based senior negotiators. That effort too fizzled out by the next spring, and focus of Geneva-based delegations shifted to more procedural and practical matters like the templates for making commitments, collection of data to determine base years, and so on.

Political leaders continued to meet, in the meanwhile, in various configurations and on the margins of various other meeting opportunities, with November slated to see the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Yokohama followed by the G-20 meeting in Seoul. Another spring is coming, yet no deal appears on the horizon.

In this pessimistic scenario, what can India do? As an engaged trading partner, it can reassess its offers for others to emulate. The critical decision piece needing attention is the "modalities" on agriculture and non-agriculture market access (NAMA): involving reduction of tariffs on agriculture products, elimination of export subsidies and reduction of domestic subsidies, and reduction of tariff and non-tariff barriers on industrial products.

In NAMA, the discussions focus on three issues —"coefficients" for tariff reduction, the anti-concentration clause and "sectorals". On the first two, while India may not accept blanket restriction on flexibility built into the December 2008 texts, it is not likely to block a deal. The issue of sectorals, where members may agree to undertake deeper tariff reduction commitments in selected sectors, is more sensitive. India has not shown any aversion to engage on the issue in its effort to get a deal through.

During the last couple of rounds of negotiations on the subject, India has come out with more substantive economic arguments on the difficulties in sectors of interest to others, including through accompanying large business delegations from sectors like the automobiles, and submitting joint proposals in sectors like chemicals. These contributions should enable its trading partners to make a balanced assessment of how far to push India.

India has also been at the forefront of developing a mechanism to address non-tariff barriers, a joint proposal which was discussed at length in the last round of negotiations in October.

Agriculture negotiations are more important for India, with two-third of its population dependent on subsistence farming. Although a number of issues appear to be unsettled in these negotiations - cuts in overall trade distorting support (OTDS), percentage of products to be declared as sensitive products and the connected issue of tariff rate quota expansion, tariff capping, special products — the critical issue needing innovative handling is the proposed Special Safeguards Mechanism (SSM) for developing countries. The proposed SSM would enable developing countries like India to take remedial action through higher tariffs in case of import surges or import induced price declines.

The main differences are between India and the US about the extent of increase in import volume (i.e. the volume trigger) required to cross the Uruguay Round (UR) bound levels of tariffs and the extent to which the UR bound tariffs could be exceeded. Rather than try and reach a compromise the waters are being muddied by other new proposed instruments, which would just bore the reader. However, my feeling is that India will agree on a new trigger benchmark, and the US should show flexibility on these new issues.

The state of negotiations is unclear if not comatose at present. The technical work in the various committees appears to have moved forward with work on scheduling having progressed in parallel to the negotiations of commitments. Given the broad support to calibrated liberalisation accompanied by regulatory and institutional flanking policies amongst the Indian political establishment, India will not be the deal breaker. It will continue to sit on the high table as a deal maker rather than a deal breaker so long as its farm sector is protected, no commitment of a zero-for-zero industrial goods sector is insisted upon, commercially meaningful liberalisation is secured in services and a commitment to accommodate the UN Convention on Biodiversity in TRIPs is agreed to.

The writer is Secrtary General Cuts International

Atul Kaushik, Secretary General, CUTS International, Geneva contributed to this article