El fracaso de las negociaciones de Doha es una bofetada a las aspiraciones de trabajadores, agricultores y empresarios en todo el mundo.
Esa es la apreciación que hace la U.S. Chamber of Commerce y Susan Schwab, U.S. Trade Representative.




Statements by Office of the U.S. Trade Representative:U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab:
“The way we decided to address it was to have Lamy as a facilitator do confessionals, and I will tell you that when we sat down with Lamy we were very forthcoming and very clear in our flexibilities, both in terms of cuts in domestic support and in terms of market access ambitions.
And it became very clear yesterday as we were going around the room at the G-6 that we were probably the only country during the confessional process that put a significant, a significantly more flexible offer on the table in the context of the confessionals. You can’t expect the United States to put its offer on the table, and he said no, nor should you given the fact that there are clear gaps that are not going to be reconcilable.”
“When we started going around the room it was very clear that no one had budged from the positions they took four weeks ago, and quite frankly, four months ago.
At that point when we took Lamy aside and said where is everybody else’s flexibility?
He acknowledged that while the US had provided flexibilities there were not, again, sufficient commonality to close the deal.”
“…when we’re talking about the EU, since they seem to be doing the majority of the finger-pointing at this point, the finger-pointing can’t hide the fact that their average agriculture tariffs are twice as high as ours and that their farm subsidies are more than three times what ours are. So they have not been a profile on political courage here.”

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns:
“The challenge became even greater when they [the EU] outlined their approach to sensitive products.
For example, I’ll just give you one quick example.
Around the world many countries raise beef, therefore selling beef into a marketplace is very important.
The current tariff for high quality beef in the European Union is 80 percent.
With the tariff proposal out there, their new tariff would be 61 percent, so still a very, very high tariff.
They also indicated that they would likely designate this product as a sensitive product which means that they would put in place a TRQ. So we got to probing about how much beef was that?
How much beef would the world be able to sell into the European Union?
The answer to that was 160,000 metric tons.
That’s about two percent of their marketplace.
That is virtually no market access.
That is saying to the world that all of you get to divide up 160,000 metric tons. Now they’re making the case that you get 800,000 tons, but from that, the extra tonnage is what they anticipate their consumers might need.
It is not granted by the TRQ.
So it truly is a situation where we haven’t been granted market access.”
“The developing countries have tabled a proposal and I didn’t see any flexibility whatsoever in what they tabled.
It’s a G-33 proposal and it basically says that they would have the right to protect 95 to 98 percent of their agricultural marketplace.
Ninety-five to 98 percent in the growing economies of the world, they would have the ability under their proposal to say when they would deal with us, how they would deal with us, what products they would deal with us on.
It just is a devastating proposal in terms of market access.”




Analysis from international news outlets:
“At last week’s St. Petersburg summit, Bush and E.U. Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso promised to hand their negotiators a stronger bargaining mandate. That gesture belly-flopped shortly after, when French President Jacques Chirac reminded Barroso he has no power to dictate the terms of the WTO talks.”
Dow Jones Newswires, July 23, 2006




“Some officials within the 13 or 14 agrarian EU member states periodically orchestrated by France to prevent bigger cuts in European farm tariffs have also been privately half-hoping that the talks would fail.”
The Financial Times, July 24, 2006

“In Japan, where domestic producers of some farm items are heavily protected with high tariffs, representatives of the agricultural industry expressed relief over the suspension of the WTO process. But manufacturers of industrial items were disappointed as they missed chances for boosting their exports to developing countries. A Japanese farm trade negotiator said, “I regret the rupture of the WTO talks but it enabled us to avoid the worst scenario, in which a food importer like Japan is forced to widely open its market. Japan imposes a 778 per cent tariff on rice imports and levies three-digit tariffs on other politically sensitive items, including wheat and dairy products.”

BBC Monitoring International Reports translation of Kyodo, July 24, 2006




“We couldn’t support an outcome that did not match our ambitions,” said Mark Vaile, Australia’s Trade Minister.
Australia’s Associated Press, July 24, 2006




“Unless an eleventh hour deal can be reached, this collapse in the Doha talks will be damaging to the cause of freer and fairer international trade, will hurt British consumers and businesses through higher costs and will be a disaster for developing nations. The UK Government must redouble its efforts to ensure Commissioner Mandelson and the EU is willing to make reasonable compromises on the key issue of farm tariffs and subsidies. These talks are simply too important to allow a collapse to be an option.”
Statement by Alan Duncan, UK Shadow Secretary, July 24, 2006