Lamy tries to rally the troops

Reuters is reporting that WTO head Pascal Lamy will convene delegations in Geneva for a big push on the Doha round: World Trade Organization chief Pascal Lamy has invited its 153 member delegations to a meeting on November 30, seeking to build on calls this month by the G20 and APEC summits to finish the ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

Reuters is reporting that WTO head Pascal Lamy will convene delegations in Geneva for a big push on the Doha round:

Reuters is reporting that WTO head Pascal Lamy will convene delegations in Geneva for a big push on the Doha round:

World Trade Organization chief Pascal Lamy has invited its 153 member delegations to a meeting on November 30, seeking to build on calls this month by the G20 and APEC summits to finish the Doha round of global trade talks. Lamy wants to revitalize the stalled talks on global commerce which began nine years ago, sources close to the trade negotiations said on Thursday.

According to this Wall Street Journal account, Lamy left the G-20 summit buoyed by what he heard from national leaders, including President Obama. There certainly was plenty of rhetoric before and during the G-20 on the need to finally conclude Doha. "It’s an international embarrassment that we haven’t completed this trade round," said David Cameron.  That kind of urgency may have made Lamy one of the very few officials to leave Seoul more cheerful than he arrived.

Russia’ s moves to finally ready itself for membership have also boosted spirits at the WTO, though Lamy is quick to say that Russia may not complete the accession process by 2011. (Behind the scenes, WTO officials have periodically tried to serve as intermediaries between Russia and Georgia, to ensure that their animosity does not further delay Moscow’s bid.) Behind all the public optimism, however, there must be nervousness in Geneva that whatever political energy there is for advancing trade will be siphoned off into regional projects like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which got a big boost during the APEC summit and which may soon include Japan. As Lamy knows only too well, political and legislative appetite for complex trade deals is limited.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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