World Trade Organisation (WTO) director-general, Pascal Lamy, opens the informal Trade Negotiations Committee meeting at the WTO headquarters, in Geneva, July 24. Talks by major trade powers to save the World Trade Organisation's Doha round collapsed last week, leaving the future of negotiations on a global free trade deal in doubt. - REUTERS
It was not politically expedient for America to allow the recently collapsed World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks to succeed, according to the Barbados Minister of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Kerrie Symmonds, who said the Americans were "more inward-
looking now than they have ever been."
Symmonds contended: "There has been an inflexibility from the very beginning on the part of both the Europeans and the Americans - but particularly so, the United States.
Main
complaint
"Their position is particularly disappointing because small economies with a long history of relationships, in terms of trade and efforts at development, with big economies expect that when you come to a table to set concrete rules and work out deadlines which would be mutually advantageous, you are going to be dealing with people who come to the table with clean hands."
The minister said this was Barbados' main complaint about its biggest trading partner, even in negotiations in the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
And, while Barbados and other developing countries try to grapple with the impact of the failed WTO talks, Symmonds charged: "What we continue to see is a willingness to protect the U.S. farm belt at all costs - and there is no secret that Oregon, Nebraska and Arizona are the states which are most meaningful to the fight of the Republicans in Congress to retain their strength."
The Barbadian politician assessed that a certain level of political expediency was "creeping into" the multilateral trading process.
He told Barbados Business Authority: "If these talks broke down as a result of political expediency, the time is perhaps ripe for political intervention at the very highest levels in order to get the thing back on- stream so that the whole world does not suffer as a result of it."
