Is That the Best You Can Do?

An update from my blog entry on Friday:  The G8 summit has not given any substantive support to the Doha round of trade talks that I can discern. The best the G8 leaders (minus Russia, who failed to convince the US to sign off on their membership application to the WTO) could do apparently was to issue a statement of encouragement to WTO members to keep negotiating, and a permission slip for the WTO Director-General, Pascal Lamy, to consult with members in the hope of promoting "early agreement" (this coming five years into the launch of the Doha round). The leaders gave Mr Lamy until mid-August to report back on his mission. Note that this call to unblock trade talks was from only developed members of the WTO: Brazil and India, the two most powerful developing members in the WTO, will meet with the G8 today and will no doubt have their own perspective.

The G8 leaders' statement implied they had come to no agreement as to how to break the current stalemate over trade talks, and provides much less momentum than would have been hoped for. For a group calling for "utmost urgency" in concluding a deal, they sure seem reluctant to do any heavy lifting themselves.