http://www.bworldonline.com/BW080708/content.php?id=002

THE PHILIPPINES will have to review existing World Trade Organization
(WTO) commitments vis-a-vis obligations under regional and bilateral
deals in a bid to strengthen its bargaining position in future global
negotiations.

And pending any new attempts to grasp the grail of a world trade pact,
the government must provide sweeping support to farmers and fisherfolk
to ensure their competitiveness.

A government and multisectoral task force made the recommendations on
Monday even as they agreed that the gains from a successful conclusion
of the Doha round would be modest.

"The Philippines might not be losing much from the collapse of the
Doha agenda as currently structured and designed," Lupino Lazaro Jr.,
a senior policy analyst at the Agriculture department, told a forum.
Mr. Lazaro, who was part of the Philippine delegation to the WTO talks
in Geneva, is a member of the Task Force WTO Agreement on Agriculture
Renegotiation, which also has representatives from the departments of
Trade and Industry, Agrarian Reform, and various agricultural
associations.

He said fresh WTO talks would have to wait for one to three years at
the earliest, at least until after the US presidential elections. The
so-called hibernation state of negotiations could take longer with the
elections in major players Brazil and India, he added.
Anti-free trade activists, meanwhile, hope the latest Doha setback
spell the end of the talks.

"It has died three times, in Cancun, Potsdam and now in Geneva. But
the problem with Doha is [it is] like Dracula — it keeps coming back
from the dead until you put a silver stake on it," University of the
Philippines professor Walden Bello told BusinessWorld.
"I hope this latest collapse was the silver stake that went through
Doha," he added.

Marathon talks in Geneva aimed at liberalizing global trade collapsed
on Tuesday last week after China, India and the US failed to agree on
import rules.

The WTO came into being on Jan. 1, 1995 and is the successor to the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The latter was created
shortly after World War II, in 1947, and continued to operate for
almost five decades as a de facto international trade body.

The Doha development round of trade talks started in 2001 with the aim
of addressing inequality so that the developing world could benefit
more from freer trade. But talks have repeatedly collapsed as
developed countries failed to agree with developing nations on terms
of access to each others' markets.

The US and the European Union want greater access to provide services
to fast-growing emerging countries, including China and India.
Developing countries, meanwhile, want greater access for their
agricultural products in Europe and the US.

At the Doha round, the main stumbling block was farm import rules
which would allow countries to protect poor farmers by imposing a
tariff on certain goods in the event of a drop in prices or a surge in
imports. India, China and the US could not agree on the tariff
threshold.

Mr. Lazaro said the revival of the Doha round, if at all, could
restart with agreements under the Hong Kong Ministerial declaration in
2005. He added that commitments under the Uruguay Round remain, even as he warned of a storm of disputes.

"There will be a refocusing towards regular committee and
implementation-related work, and the dispute settlement mechanism may
be revitalized to address members' trade concerns," he said.
Mr. Lazaro noted that following the failed talks, the Philippines
would have de facto special products — sensitive goods for which it
wants protection — since it would not be required to cut tariffs
further on agricultural products for some time.

"However, this is also true for other WTO members."
He also said the country would have to contend with existing special
agricultural safeguards — a scheme that allows a country to hike
tariffs if imports exceed trigger levels — in the absence of a more
accessible and effective mechanism. The Philippines, he added, would maintain its special treatment on rice until 2012.

Mr. Lazaro, meanwhile, cited a Carnegie Endowment study that showed
the gains from the Doha round would have been rather modest at $60
billion or 0.1% of world gross domestic product.

China, he added, would have gained 1% in real income because of labor
advantages. "Liberalizing agriculture alone does not benefit most
developing countries or regions," he said, adding that countries like
Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand would have benefited most from the
global trade deal.

Mr. Bello cited the need to move away from global trade agreements.
"You have to put development at the center rather than trade," he
said.

Jessica Cantos, lead convenor of Rice Watch and Action Network, cited
the need for more trade coherence both here and abroad.
She criticized "conflicting messages" from government officials at the
WTO negotiations in Geneva on the one hand and from Agriculture
Secretary Arthur C. Yap and Trade Secretary Peter B. Favila in Manila
on the other.

Mr. Bello said the WTO model failed because it had been structurally
designed to benefit developed countries and disadvantage developing
ones.

He noted that under its framework, developing nations could only form
defensive coalitions without ever being able to advance their
interest.

"[The WTO mechanism] only allows for defensive coalition building, not
a platform for equitable trade."