Addressing a South African Institute of International Affairs gathering in Johannesburg, Dr Mills Soko, of the UCT Graduate School of Business, said that many developed-country citizens now, rightly or wrongly, perceived further liberalisation as a threat and feared the future influence of countries such as China and India.

For this reason, there was a lack of political impetus behind the current Doha Round, launched in the Qatari capital in 2001, with the primary aim of opening up the highly protected agricultural markets of the West to products from developing countries.

Business in rich countries were also relatively uninterested in the round, given a feeling that the previous Uruguay Round had already delivered on most of its market-access aspirations.

Soko - who was also a member of the high-powered Warwick Commission, which recently completed a wide-ranging investigation of the global trading system, which is to be presented at a sitting of the WTO in Geneva on December 7 - said there was, thus, a lack of alignment between the current business cycle, corporate decision making and the cumbersome trade-negotiations process.

Evidence of the malaise could be seen in the fact that the Democratic-led Congress in the US had failed to extend the mandate of its trade negotiators under the Trade Promotion Authority, and had even retreated from earlier commitments to reduce trade-distorting domestic support to its farmers. Similarly, there were moves in the European Union to ensure that the commitments made under the Common Agricultural Policy were not locked-in through the Doha process.

By contrast, larger emerging markets such as Brazil, China, India and South Africa could see the potential benefits of further globalisation and were seeking greater liberalisation. However, Soko suggested that there were still some protectionist tendencies even in these countries.

WTO REFORM BECOMING URGENT

He refused to offer deep insight into possible recommendations that would be contained in the Warwick Commission report, save to say that these would focus on ways to improve the management of the WTO and the transparency of agenda setting and decision making. He also indicated that there was a strong acknowledgement in the report that reforms were needed to counter a far more aggressive return to protectionism.

Soko said these reforms also had to seek ways of navigating the difficult relationship between trade and development, and ensuring that the current proliferation of bilateral trade agreements did not entirely undermine the coherence of the multilateral trading system.

Concurring on the need for far-reaching reform was the Southern African Trade Hub's Paulina Elago. Also speaking at the event, she suggested that WTO responsibilities might even need to be scaled back in a bid to focus the organisation on those areas where it could be most effective.

She also questioned the future viability of long, protracted rounds, which ultimately had the effect of diluting the potential benefits.

Christian Aid's Kato Kambrechts agreed, suggesting that the WTO was becoming less and less relevant to least-developed countries, which were gaining most of their market-access benefits through unilateral offers from rich countries, such as under the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act and the European Partnership Agreements.

She also criticised the continued assertion by political elites in developing countries that trade openness necessarily led to economic development, arguing that such openness was, in fact, a natural response to development and not the other way around.

For its part, the South African government remained a keen supporter of Doha Round progress, with the head of South Africa's delegation to the WTO in Geneva, Faizel Ismail telling Polity earlier that the round should not be allowed to die, even if a breakthrough was not found by early next year.

Ismail acknowledged that further delays in the process would unfairly constrain the prospect for pro-development outcomes, but he argued that a total collapse would be devastating to trading systems and world stability.

"The future of the WTO is important to South Africa. We view it as a critical lever in reducing the natural tensions that arise when countries trade with one another," Ismail argues, noting that both the World Wars of the last century had serious trade-trade-imbalance undertones. "But, as South Africa, we also view it as part of building better global governance, and we are, thus, in this for the long haul," he concluded.