(This is the first of a two-part series. The second part will be carried tomorrow)

It is now more than a fortnight since the fifth Ministerial Conference of the WTO (World Trade Organisation) came to an abrupt end. The sound and the fury that the Conference generated have gradually died down and, hopefully, tempers would have cooled.

It is necessary for all of us who were present there, for the entire Membership of the WTO, to reflect objectively on what happened, what went wrong, what went right, and in what manner we can move forward, as we have always done to achieve the goals that we had set out for ourselves at Doha.

In my view, it is a fundamental mistake to treat any Ministerial Conference as a one-off event where crucial decisions are taken by ministers over a short period of four or five days. No Ministerial Conference can be a five-day wonder.

Success depends essentially on the months and months of painstaking negotiations that take place before any such event and the extent to which reasonable outcome is worked out by technical experts and negotiators before the main event.

The story of Cancun, therefore, cannot be confined to what happened during those five days in that beautiful Mexican seaside resort. It started in fact even before Doha and the struggle that developing countries collectively waged to ensure that the development dimension becomes the focus of attention in the Doha Work Programme.

When one talks of Doha, the image of my distinguished predecessor, Murasoli Maran comes immediately to mind. Maran, even then an ailing and sick person, fought valiantly for hours on end to protect our national interests and the concerns of developing countries. His single-minded devotion to his cause has now passed into the folklore of the WTO.

The Doha Ministerial Declaration affirmed the importance of trade as an instrument for economic development, particularly in the developing and least developed countries. It says, "The majority of WTO members are developing countries. We seek to place their needs and interests at the heart of the Work Programme adopted in this Declaration."

This is not a new concept. This is really what the negotiators of the Uruguay Round had also intended. The Marrakesh Agreement establishing the World Trade Organisation had also recognised "the need for positive efforts designed to ensure that developing countries, and especially the least developed among them, secure a share in the growth in international trade commensurate with the needs of their economic development".

The Doha Declaration was an attempt to bring the work of the WTO back to its first principles.

After Doha, however, negotiations in Geneva languished. For many months thereafter, there seemed to be no effective engagement between negotiators aimed at addressing the very real problems of development.

The Doha Declaration had laid down some clear deadlines for achievement of development related results within a given timeframe. These related to Special and Differential Treatment provisions, the so- called Implementation Issues (basically, problems which developing countries identified during the implementation of the Uruguay Round Agreements), the problem of creating an effective mechanism for addressing the difficulties faced by developing and least developed countries which have no or insufficient manufacturing capacity in the pharmaceutical sector and the deadlines laid down in respect of core market access areas like Agriculture, Non-Agricultural Market Access and Services.

Deadline after deadline passed without concrete results. Resentment amongst developing and least developed countries was building up. Some of our trading partners and the WTO Secretariat itself seemed to be oblivious to the changing atmosphere in Geneva.

It is not my intention here to expatiate at length on the various issues that were either on the negotiating table or under discussion in the WTO bodies. A high degree of distortion prevails in the agricultural sector, with heavy subsidies being given in certain developed countries to their farmers.

This not only limits access into markets in these countries, it also prevents fair competition in third country markets. Besides, inflow of subsidised products ruined the rural sector in many extremely poor developing countries. The developing countries, by and large, are heavily dependent on agriculture and the existing system was preventing growth and it was decimating agriculture in many developing countries.

In countries like India, with a huge rural population entirely dependent on agriculture and a large proportion of them either below or close to the poverty line, a small disruption in the market could bring down prices sharply, leading to a fall in incomes and to actual starvation and widespread misery.

Likewise, industry in developing countries has to face its own problems of poor infrastructure, high capital cost, low levels of productivity arising out of capital and technology deficiencies and a host of other problems.

Moreover, in order to mitigate the problems arising out of shortage of capital, we have had to depend on small-scale and cottage industries, which can provide much employment at relatively low capital cost.

In areas in which we were productive and competitive, such as textiles, we have had to face serious market access barriers arising out of quotas and trade defence measures. In the area of Services, there has been inadequate attention paid to modes of delivery of interest to us, such as movement of natural persons and cross-border supply of services and also in certain specific sectors. The emphasis has been more on commercial presence, that is, freedom to establish joint ventures, foreign owned companies and so on.

We would have expected that these problems would have been addressed in the Geneva negotiations. The fact is that there was hardly any movement throughout the period after Doha and no genuine effort to address developing country problems.

When I talk of developing country problems, I am of course conscious of the fact that developing countries themselves have varying positions on different issues and that what applies to India need not necessarily apply to other developing countries.

However, what we saw at Cancun was a high degree of unity and commonality of interest amongst developing countries even though not all countries shared the same position on all issues. For example, not all developing countries had the same position as ours on the Singapore issues. Similarly, in agriculture, the emphasis varied from country to country on the three pillars of the Agreement on Agriculture – domestic support, export competition and market access.

What was really heartening was the desire of developing countries to reach out to each other, accommodate their problems in a spirit of understanding and goodwill and to forge common positions wherever possible. This is now universally recognized as a positive outcome of the Cancun Ministerial Conference.

Some movement took place just a few weeks before the Cancun Ministerial Conference. The US and the EU decided to come together and prepare a framework proposal on Agriculture. This was seen by many developing countries as no more than an attempt to accommodate each other's concerns, without regard for the interests of developing countries. Developing countries, therefore, came forward to present their own ideas in the form of an alternative text. This was the genesis of the G-17, which has now become the G-22.

A word now about the Singapore Issues. These were new issues, relating to trade and investment, trade and competition policy, trade facilitation and transparency in Government procurement, which had appeared on the agenda of the WTO at the Singapore Ministerial Conference in 1996, thus acquiring the nomenclature "Singapore Issues". India had expressed itself clearly against the expansion of the agenda to the WTO right from the start. We were always of the view that we have enough on our plate already, that there are many commitments and obligations to fulfil even with respect to existing Uruguay Round Agreements and that the limitations and constraints of developing countries as well as their right to retain policy space for fashioning their own development strategy should be recognized.

However, following the decision at Doha to engage in a process of clarification of issues in respect of each of the Singapore four, we put forward a large number of papers and involved ourselves actively in the discussions.

At the end of the period, we found that the issues remained as unclear as before. What, for example, is the definition of investment? According to the Europeans and the Japanese, it means only foreign direct investment, but the US considers that even portfolio investment and short-term capital flows should be brought within the purview of a possible multilateral agreement on investment. How do we deal with the question of investors' obligations and the obligations of home countries? In the area of competition policy, will the multilateral framework extend to international cartels spanning many countries? Will the concept of trade facilitation extend to all customs entry points or only to a few major ports? Since modernisation and automation of ports will involve huge expenditure, who will finance the costs? Does government procurement mean only procurement at the federal level, but also procurement at sub- federal levels and public sector units? India and a group of other countries put forward a detailed paper indicating the areas that needed clarification in respect of each of the four issues.

Internal transparency is a subject that India and many other developing countries have been emphasising for many years now. After Doha, India and 14 other countries put forward a paper with several suggestions regarding the manner in which there could be inclusiveness and transparency in the process leading up to a Ministerial Conference and at the Conference itself. This was discussed at the General Council meeting in December 2002 but with no tangible result.

The WTO has developed the strange practice of the Chairman, General Council, submitting to the Ministerial Conference a draft text on his own responsibility without negotiation and without taking into account the differences in views that Members may express. This was done at Doha and, somehow, some countries felt that the same process could be repeated ad infinitum with success.

As a result, one cannot escape the conclusion that the attempt throughout has been to downgrade and underplay the Geneva process of technical work, to come out with some paper on the Chairman's responsibility just before a Ministerial Conference and then apply political pressure on weaker countries at the Conference itself.

We had cautioned the membership against proceeding on the assumption that the Doha process can be repeated over and over again. At the meeting of the General Council held on 8, July, 2002, the Indian Ambassador had stated, "We must not also presume that the Doha outcome necessarily justifies the Geneva process preceding the Ministerial or the procedures at the Ministerial itself. The Doha Ministerial Conference took place in a particular historical context; Cancun will take place in another context. Doha laid a framework for a work programme; Cancun will endeavour to flesh out this framework. Even the Doha framework has many holes in it. The fact that the mandate is not clear and explicit in all aspects is evident from the time and resources we spend here in Geneva in debating the meaning of certain decisions. My delegation believes that in the Cancun Ministerial Conference, Ministers will demand a much higher degree of precision in the final draft as serious commercial and developmental interests would be at stake."

Yet this is precisely what happened at Cancun. The Chairman of the General Council produced a draft Ministerial Text with which many developing countries were extremely uncomfortable. On agriculture, there was a perception that he was adhering closely to the EC-US draft. On Singapore issues, while he indicated the two alternatives of agreement on modalities and further clarification of the issues respectively, he also incorporated separate annexes indicating possible modalities for agreement. None of these modalities had been negotiated and agreed to. Thus, even to begin with, the atmosphere at Cancun was surcharged.

At Cancun, the Chairman of the Ministerial Conference, Minister Derbez of Mexico, appointed Facilitators to discuss various issues. There were Facilitators in charge of Agriculture, Non Agricultural Market Access, Singapore Issues, Developmental Issues, and other issues respectively. Besides, on the crucial issue of cotton subsidies, the Director General of the WTO himself undertook negotiations. This issue had great emotive appeal, particularly to the Africa Group. Cotton subsidies given in one or two major countries were badly hurting the cotton farmers in African countries and four of them, Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali had got the issue incorporated in the agenda of the Ministerial Conference for possible solution.

PTI