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“deadline: by 1 January 2005”.
The decision to begin negotiations on a future investment agreement within the
WTO was thus not already made in Doha, as the EU had, for example, constantly
repeated. This decision depended on the potential agreement in Cancún on the
modalities and the content of the negotiations. And this decision never materialized:
Cancún “failed”.
Numerous articles haunted the world press in the days after the 5th Ministerial
Conference which ascribed the preliminary failure of the Doha Agenda in Cancún to
the irreconcilable contradictions between the states of the North, who insisted on
subsidies for their domestic agricultural markets and exports, and the states of the
South, who were up in arms against these subsidies which rob the basis of livelihood
from millions of agricultural workers through this subsidized price dumping.
Many speculations on the reasons for the break down in Cancún arose, e.g.,
that some delegations recognized earlier than the European delegation, led by Trade
Commissioner Lamy, that due to the disputed agricultural question no agreement
would be reached, so that it would be better to induce an early failure at a time when
the negotiations on the sensible agricultural issue had not yet started and the also
heavily disputed Singapore issues, like investment, public procurement, competition
policy and trade facilitation were on the agenda. As the European Union is one of the
main advocates of these “new issues” - even though the EU in Cancún, after having
encountered a strong, resistance finally managed to take back the issues of investment
and competition policy in order to maintain at any cost the issues of public
procurement and trade facilitation on the agenda – the guilty states could be found
among those, who, like the EU, insistently wanted to negotiate the – even though reduced
– Singapore issues, before discussing the agricultural issue. Another version
is obviously the one of the EU –trade –delegation, which wanted to put the blame for
the failure of the negotiations on the G-20 countries, which were formed in Cancún.
The “failure” of Cancún, however, does not mean that the issues of commercializing
public goods and services, as well as cross-border investment “protection”
treaties, are off the table.
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