The suggestion by top US and EU trade officials that emerging economies need to make big concessions mean there is little hope of reaching a global trade deal this week, the head of Oxfam International said on Monday. Statements from US Trade Representative Susan Schwab and EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson saying such concessions were needed to forge a World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement, were “outrageous”, Jeremy Hobbs said. The aid advocacy group's executive director said the food and fuel price crisis, combined with looming economic trouble, had created hardship in poor countries and made it unreasonable to expect them to give even more at the WTO. “The hypocrisy is breathtaking and Oxfam is skeptical a deal is possible in that context,” he told journalists in Geneva. “It is extremely important that people do not get away with spinning this as ‘the developing countries are blocking.'” The WTO's Doha round was launched in 2001 with the stated aim of helping fight poverty and spur economic development by enabling poor-country producers to sell more of their wares abroad. But the multilateral negotiations - which require consensus among all 152 WTO member governments - have struggled to overcome many countries' resistance to exposing sensitive industries to more foreign competition. On the first day of a high-stakes negotiating push among ministers in Geneva, rich and poor nations turned the spotlight on each other over who should move first, and by how much. Anti-poverty activists and development campaigners said they were concerned that Brazil, India and other emerging countries would be squeezed in the talks chaired by WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, which include about 30 ministers representing a range of interests in the Doha talks. Nathan Irumba, Uganda's ambassador to the WTO from 1996 to 2004, said he was concerned that developing-country parties to those exclusive, closed-door talks would be pressured to accept proposals that would hurt poorer countries. “The process is really worrisome,” said Irumba, who is now head of an African think-tank focused on trade negotiations. He said the range of proposals now being negotiated would not provide meaningful export opportunities for poor farmers. “No deal is better than a bad deal,” he said. The United States should make deeper farm subsidy cuts than currently proposed in world trade talks and scale back demands on developing countries to open their markets, a leading development group said on Monday. “This is the Doha Development Round, not the Doha tit-for-tat round. Rich countries must stop demanding harsh conditions from developing countries,” Oxfam International said in a new report, which concluded that new US farm legislation had greatly complicated the task of negotiating a successful world trade agreement that curbs farm subsidies and tariffs. Trade ministers representing around 30 key members of the World Trade Organization are in Geneva this week to try for a long-awaited breakthrough in agriculture and manufactured goods talks at the heart of the nearly seven-year-old Doha round, named for the Qatari capital where they were launched. “Unfortunately, the US Congress has undermined the Doha round at a critical point with its trade-distorting farm bill. It would take a major act of courage and decision to set the negotiations back on track,” the Oxfam report said.
