November 2006/N°14 The future of WTO´s Doha Round: From the suspension of the negotiations to possible scenarios and their implications for development The negotiations of the Doha Development Agenda(DDA) are facing their most difficult phase after having been suspended de facto across the board on 27 July. Their current status can be characterized as interplay between entrenched positions of key trading nations on the one side and the pressure to resume negotiations(mainly from developing countries) on the other, com­bined with an overall lack of leadership. It remains rather unclear when the negotiations of the DDA will be resumed and what the implications of the final outcome are for developing countries. What has happened since July 2006? “Time for reflection” and“silent diplomacy” After the suspension of the Round, Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the WTO, announced a“time for reflection” to allow each constituency to con­sider what is at stake and to review its negotiation position. This“time-out” was necessary since the negotiations were stuck between formulae and numbers, and stakeholders seemed to have lost sight of the broader picture of the Round. Various civil society groups took advantage and urged to start thinking more creatively on how to achieve the development aspects of the Round. Although no official meeting of the WTO negotiating bodies has taken place since then, various meetings of key players occurred, such as the G-20 High Level Meeting on 9 September in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Cairns Group Ministerial Meeting from 20-22 September in Cairns, Australia; the IMF/World Bank annual meetings from 13-20 September in Singapore; and regional group meetings. Besides, a number of bilateral meetings among major trad­ing nations took place to try to bridge their differ­ences – a process that Lamy referred to as“silent diplomacy”. Despite all these efforts, members remain very much entrenched in their positions. Time for a“Geneva consensus” The major challenge of a“Development” Round is to contribute to the goal that trade works better for development. In this regard, three problems emerge: First, there is no panacea, i.e. each of the 149 WTO members has to find a somehow differ­ent strategy. Second, conducive multilateral rules are important but must be complemented by supportive national and/or regional measures. Third, trade opportunities and adjustment costs arising from a successful completion of the Round are distributed unequally among WTO members. Thus, Lamy called for a“Geneva consensus”, ar­guing that the adjustment costs and imbalances of winners and losers of trade liberalization must be addressed properly. Some progress in WTO’s Aid for Trade Initiative The Aid for Trade Initiative was added as a late­comer to the DDA at the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference in 2005 to assist developing countries in benefiting from the multilateral trading system, e.g. by building supply-side capacity and trade­related infrastructure. In February 2006, a Task Force was established to work on how to opera­tionalize Aid for Trade. The WTO General Council endorsed these recommendations at its meeting in October and made clear that Aid for Trade was not part of the“single undertaking” and could be continued to be discussed formally. Although the initiative gains strong support among most WTO members, there remain more questions than an­swers: Apart from the general question why WTO should engage itself in this activity, it is still unclear how much additional funds will be pledged, which criteria should be used for its distribution and – most important – how to implement it ef­fectively. While Aid for Trade is no substitute for a successful outcome of the DDA, it might be an