The final stages of World Trade Organisation Doha Round negotiations are a question of basic political will, delegates at the ABARE Outlook conference in Canberra heard today.

Crawford Falconer, Deputy Secretary of the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and former Chair of the WTO Agricultural Negotiations said that, fundamentally, finalising the negotiations is a question of political will.

“There needs to be a serious investment in political capital to restart the negotiations. Key players will need to get serious and put more on the table than they have done to date,” Mr Falconer said, conceding that a number of important issues are still to be resolved.

Professor Robert Thompson, Gardner Chair in Agricultural Policy at the University of Illinois, said that the political reality following the global financial crisis was that the US would not give serious support to the Doha Round unless key local interest groups perceived there was a significant real increase in market access in exchange for local trade policy reforms.

“Around 2013, the stars might be realigned with the EU and the US considering their respective key farm support policies,” Professor Thompson said.

Also addressing delegates on the future directions for trade policy, Andrew Stoler, Executive Director of the Institute for International Trade at the University of Adelaide, said the Doha Round is failing.

“In part this is due to the ‘single undertaking’ framework in which it is being conducted, where an unnecessarily large number of countries are involved and are complicating an already complex process,” Mr Stoler said.

“Departing from the single undertaking and pursuing agricultural negotiations through a critical mass framework with as few as 35 WTO members would cover more than 80 per cent of global trade in the most important agricultural commodities, and produce an outcome that would likely be more economically important than the Doha Round approach.

“Despite the obvious attractions of the critical mass framework, most governments are unable to think outside the box.”