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2 Law & Dev. Rev. 1 (2009)

handle is hein.journals/ldevr2 and id is 1 raw text is: Karmakar: New Contours of India's Multilateral Engagement I. INTRODUCTION Notwithstanding the repeated demonstrated willingness of WTO Members to engage concertedly for a rapid conclusion of the Doha Round, from the numerous setbacks and temporary suspensions of dialogue it appears that the current Round of the Multilateral Trade Negotiation (MTN) is not destined for a speedy conclusion. The breakdown of Ministerial talks in Geneva at the end of July 2008 revealed the continued presence of some stark political constraints on agricultural and manufactured goods trade liberalisation; these limitations are unlikely to go away soon. This failure being third in a row (since the launch of the Round in November 2001) of such meetings aimed at concluding the ongoing WTO negotiations has generated predictable lamentations from analysts on the impending death of Doha and even the demise of multilateralism as the most favoured global trade liberalisation tool. The entrenched positions of India and China in the agriculture negotiations on issues of developing country flexibilities under the Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) which countered offers of the industrialised country players like the US have been cited as the central reason for this most recent dissolution of the Ministerial talks. While agriculture negotiations are central to the conclusion of the Round and have proved a difficult beast to control since the days of the Uruguay Round, it seems that such simplistic explanations and apportioning of blame are counter-productive insofar as they distract from dispassionate evaluation of the core causes of the continued deadlock. Will a resolution of the current impasse herald a smooth transition back to the earlier days when the world trade order seemingly had little problems in concluding MTNs? Or are we in an era when troubled Rounds are the order of the day? What are the underlying reasons for this observed difficulty by WTO Members to come to mutually acceptable compromises to conclude MTNs these days? While trade ministers of key WTO trading Members continue to meet in formal and informal locations to work out compromises, there is perhaps greater need now, from both WTO analysts and senior functionaries in the WTO Secretariat in Geneva, to introspect on the most proximate causes for the present day problems and to try to find workable solutions. While discussions on what ails the WTO negotiation process began in the aftermath of the failure of the Seattle Ministerial in 1999 to launch a Round, and there is by now a healthy body of literature on the need and conditions for reform in the WTO that have proposed reforms of the institution and of the processes of WTO negotiations,1 what is perhaps missing from the literature is a view and understanding from the I The most notable among these have been the Sutherland Report and the Warwick Commission Report. 1

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