archives: WTO InfoLamy returns from WTO talks to face anger
By Tobias Buck in Brussels
Financial Times websitePublished: September 15 2003 18:44 | Last Updated: September 15 2003
18:44 Pascal Lamy, the European Union's top trade negotiator, returns from Cancún to face some unpleasant questions back home in Brussels.Though in his parting words he insisted "we will not play the blame game" for the failure of the talks and assured Europe's trading partners that the EU remained committed to a "strong, rule-based multilateral trading system", there was widespread disappointment and anger at EU headquarters.
Mr Lamy (pictured) can expect a particularly tough ride when he next faces the European parliament, where many left-leaning deputies have been critical of his negotiating positions.
On Monday they put the blame for the collapse of the trade meeting squarely at the rich world's door, singling out the US and the EU.
Caroline Lucas, a British Green member of the European parliament (MEP) who attended the Cancún meeting, said: "Their strategy of overloading the agenda with issues that only benefited the rich north has now been exposed as a spectacular failure and has helped to derail the WTO."
She was referring to Mr Lamy's tough position on investment rules, which the EU and Japan wanted to include in the talks against the wishes of most developing countries. It was the disagreement over such rules that eventually led to the meeting's collapse, despite a last-minute climbdown by Mr Lamy.
Nick Clegg, a British Liberal Democrat MEP who specialises in trade issues, argued that the meeting had most probably fallen victim to negotiating strategies that had failed to take into account the WTO's new membership structure. In particular, the games of brinkmanship and last-minute concessions that had characterised past trade rounds had proven ineffective.
"I suspect we will find that a fairly conventional and in the past highly successful negotiating strategy was being employed in an environment where it doesn't work any longer because you have many more volatile players involved," he said.
The failure of the talks was met with a degree of relief from European farmer organisations, who had feared the trade talks might force the EU to agree further reform of its subsidy regime.
Though the farmers' Brussels-based umbrella organisation called on the EU to continue the negotiations, the biggest French farmers' union, FNSEA, said: "Better no deal than a bad deal."
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