WTO Is Still Smarting From Fiasco in Seattle

Two weeks after its riot- and dispute-marred fiasco in Seattle, the World Trade Organization remains so polarized and paralyzed that Friday it couldn’t even agree to discuss what had gone wrong and how to fix it.

At the WTO’s first full-dress meeting since the collapse of global trade talks Dec. 3, a discussion about the lessons to be drawn from the Seattle conference was struck from the agenda by unanimous consent.

“If we hadn’t done that, the whole thing would have blown up,” Pakistani Ambassador Munir Akram said later.

“After you go through something like Seattle, a pause that refreshes is perhaps not a bad idea,” said Keith Rockwell, WTO chief spokesman.

Meeting at the WTO’s headquarters on the shores of Lake Geneva, many envoys agreed that their 135-nation organization, which functions as a rule-making body and referee for world commerce, was in the throes of crisis.

The organization was stymied in Seattle from agreeing to a new round of global trade negotiations because of deep divisions among the United States, European Union and Japan, as well as between rich and poor nations. It has also come under blame for Third World poverty, unemployment, declining populations of sea turtles and a host of other ills.

In Seattle, tens of thousands of people marched, and some rioted, against what they took to be a supernational agency not subject to democratic controls.

“Everything that goes wrong in globalization is seen as the fault of the WTO, as though we were some form of world government,” Mexican Ambassador Alejandro de la Pena said. “We need to do a better job in explaining to the general public what we do, what is important in terms of costs and benefits and, maybe most important of all, the limits to what we can do.”

However, nerves were still so raw after Seattle that the ambassadors who gathered Friday morning as the WTO’s General Council were able to agree on very little. They adopted a budget of $79 million for next year and admitted Jordan as their newest member. They also reached an informal understanding that, until they convene again, agreements expiring Dec. 31 in fields such as intellectual property, investment, government subsidies and the nontaxation of electronic commerce via the Internet will in effect be extended.

But in a bizarre semantic debate providing another clue on how divided the 5-year-old organization is, member states are still unable even to reach consensus on whether the Seattle conclave of trade and commerce ministers is officially over. The Clinton administration maintains that it is not: “It is clear the ministerial has not been completed,” Rita D. Hayes, U.S. ambassador to the WTO, said Friday.

The United States is keen on exploiting progress in some areas that was achieved in Seattle. It wants to revive the idea of a new round of global negotiations, beginning as early as next year, on further reducing tariffs on manufactured goods and keeping Internet commerce tax-free. The WTO calendar already commits member countries, as of Jan. 1, to new talks on agriculture and services.

“We do not want to start from ground zero,” Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said earlier this week. “We made significant progress [in Seattle] in agriculture, and we want to build on that progress.”

However, other countries reject the U.S. administration’s thinking.

The Seattle meeting was “a complete failure,” Brazil’s ambassador to the WTO, Celso Luiz Nunez Amorim, said flatly. Nor was there much consensus Friday in Washington, where U.S. and European Union leaders wrapped up a one-day summit with a joint statement that said they want to begin new global trade talks. But how much the statement reflected genuine agreement and how much it papered over differences that emerged in Seattle were unclear.

Commerce Undersecretary David Aaron asserted at a news conference that “both sides are committed to continuing efforts to launch a new round.” But U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky appeared to contradict Aaron in warning that the EU risks destroying chances for new talks if it holds to its current negotiating position on agricultural subsidies.

“If Europe stays with its proposals from Seattle, a round will simply not launch. This is going to be a considerable challenge, I think,” she told reporters during a telephone conference call.

At the Geneva session, representatives of numerous Third World nations complained bitterly that, in Seattle, they had been barred from the “Green Room”--the sanctum where Barshefsky, who was chairing the conference, tried to cut deals with representatives of the European Union and other leading trade powers.

The debacle in Seattle followed a year of what some staff members in the WTO say was immense strife over divisive issues such as the U.S.-European dispute on bananas and the highly politicized contest for the post of director-general, which Mike Moore of New Zealand finally won.

This week, France and Japan called for another ministerial-level meeting of member countries to transform the organization, in French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s words, into something “more efficient, transparent and democratic.” With the legal status of what was done in Seattle in doubt, WTO officials Friday said they were as bewildered as anyone about what would come next.

Rockwell told reporters: “We drew up a list just for fun of all the difficult questions that could be asked by delegates and journalists, and the answer to every single one of these difficult questions was exactly the same thing--no one seems to know for sure.”

Times staff writer Peter Gosselin in Washington contributed to this report.