Geneva - The World Trade Organization (WTO) begins its first ministerial meeting in four years Monday in Geneva with moves to try to breathe life into the troubled global trade round likely to play a central role at the three-day conference. However, trade negotiations are not on the agenda for the WTO summit with the conference called to review the work of the 153-member organization including its role in helping the global economy to climb out of its steepest economic decline in a generation, battling protectionism along with the trade round.
But after eight agonizing and acrimonious years of negotiations over the Doha trade round, the ministers will be looking for clear signs from US President Barack Obama's administration on whether it is prepared to provide fresh impetus to the stalled global trade talks.
This in turn has helped to raise questions about the degree of commitment among major world capitals to completing a new trade round in the present uncertain global economic times with the risk of lengthening unemployment queues helping to stoke fears about the threat to jobs posed by liberalizing world trade.
The WTO ministers might be gathering against the backdrop of signs that a recovery in global trade from its biggest contraction since the Great Depression is helping the world economy to put the recession behind it.
But a key issue for the WTO ministers is dealing with the protectionist moves that emerged during the economic crisis as governments attempted to shield their economies from recession.
While this also serves to underscore the role played by trade in the economic crisis, it also points to the danger for the WTO that a slide to a more protectionist-inclined world might form part of the fallout from the downturn in the global economy.
As a consequence, this could make a new trade deal that much more difficult to achieve.
The Geneva summit comes a decade after a WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle aimed at driving forward the cause of global free trade was engulfed by violent protests. This was just two years before the latest trade round was launched in Doha.
In a sense the seventh ministerial conference in Geneva is likely to be a housekeeping meeting withWTO chief Pascal Lamy saying ahead of the meeting that it would be "a platform for ministers to review the functioning of this house."
The WTO member states together represent about 95 per cent of total global trade.
Apart from two non-controversial decisions on intellectual property and E-Commerce, Moscow might also use the conference to again raise it quest for WTO membership.
Lamy has called for the organization member states to step up their efforts so as to meet the deadline set by world leaders for signing off next year on the Doha trade deal, which would reduce industrial and farm tariffs and prise open trade in services such as finance.
"If we are to conclude this round in 2010 as you have pledged to, we will need to take a hard look at where things stand early in the new year and map the road that would lead us to a successful results," Lamy told the WTO general council this month.
But rather than reaching a trade accord, the international effort in facing up to the economic crisis over the last 12 months has been directed towards revamping the world financial order with the Group of 20 major world economies having emerged as a new global economic council charged with addressing the economic crisis.
What is more, the WTO meeting appears to an extent to have been overshadowed by government deliberations on Afghanistan and the attempts to ensure a measure of success next month's United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen.
But then keeping the trade round out of the spotlight at the moment might help to build a new measure of momentum behind the trade negotiations which have been hit by developed nations' attempts to protect their farmers and emerging economies' resistance to opening up their industrial and services sectors to international investment.
"Some trade officials might be happy that it is not so high on the global agenda at the moment," said Rainer Guntermann, senior European economist with Commerzbank AG.
That said, however, the risk is that failure to tackle the drift to protectionism that has emerged over the last year in the wake of the economic downturn could unleash a new round of economic tensions.
This in turn could throw up more obstacles in the way of the negotiations over the Doha trade round.
