The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders' Week meetings started here on Sunday. One main agendum for leaders of the 21 APEC economies is to push for substantive progress on stalled global trade talks.
The Doha Round of trade talks was launched by the World Trade Organization (WTO) at its ministerial conference held in Doha, Qatar in 2001
with an aim to help poor nations hurdle barriers in global trade and prosper through the free flow of goods.
Initially called the Doha Development Agenda, the Doha Round is the successor of the 1986-1994 Uruguay Round of multilateral trade talks.
Agriculture and services are "built-in" agenda as trade barriers in these two sectors are considered particularly hard to eliminate.
The initial plan is to wrap up the Doha Round in 2005 but failure of WTO's 153 members to reach a deal pushed back the schedule. Over the past
four years, new deadlines were set and broken. World leaders lately vowed to wrap up the long-running Doha trade talks in 2010.
In fact, 80 percent of the talks have been concluded but agriculture remains as the last stumbling stone. Developing countries can not get the U.S. and Europe to cut domestic farm subsidies as much as they want while the richer economies fail to persuade poorer countries to further open up their service markets, including banking and telecommunications, to international competitors.
Talks have been suspended for more than a year as negotiators failed to bridge wide disparity in opinions over farm subsidies, tariffs, and non-agricultural market access. Key WTO members only agreed in this September on a work plan to revive the round talks.
WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy last month warned that if negotiations did not pick up, the 2010 deadline might be missed again.
APEC leaders are widely believed to renew their pledge to push for the Doha Round at the current meetings. But it remains unknown whether this
pledge from the top can translate into a deal when trade representatives of the WTO members meet again on the negotiation table.