A final hour bid by the World Trade Organization (WTO) Director General Pascal Lamy to persuade the 30-odd ministers meeting here to clinch a global trade deal has been turned down by India, Japan and eight other countries.

With this, the chances of Lamy coming out with a ‘Lamy draft’ at this juncture to prevent a total collapse of the Doha Round has become more real, sources said. His predecessor Arthur Dunkel had come out with a draft (Dunkel draft) to save the talks in the Uruguay Round. However, Lamy had earlier ruled out this possibility.

The highlights of the Lamy’s effort included proposals that the US would have to cut overall trade distorting farm subsides (OTDS) to $14.4 billion and the European Union to cut their similar farm subsides to around 22 billion euros.

Developing nations, including India, have outrightly rejected the recent US offer to cut its trade distorting farm subsidies to $15 billion. Since the reported actual OTDS level of the US in 2006 and 2007 were $11 billion and $7 billion respectively, the developing nations want the offer to be renewed and brought down to a much lower level, close to the actual OTDS . Developing countries also wanted the European Union to reduce their farm tariffs, more than the 60 per cent offer made by EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson recently.

The other proposals included making 12 per cent of the overall tariff lines as special products (SPs or farm products that are subjected to minimum or no duty cuts) for developing countries, with an average cut overall of 11 per cent for those products. India had initially pitched for around 20 per cent of the total agricultural tariff lines need to be demarcated as SPs in order to adequately protect the livelihood of the country’s subsistence farmers. India was looking at least a number of 15 per cent and the 12 per cent was much below its demand.

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