Transcript
LAEL BRAINARD: The next few weeks have two of the most important sort of pow-wows of international economic ministers that we see all year. There are a lot of very weighty topics on the table for discussion, although I don't actually expect a lot of very concrete outcomes to come out of either meeting. Let me just give you a little sense of where the U.S. is likely to be on several of the kind of high-profile issues, and just touch on them briefly and we can come back to them, if you're interested, later in the questions.
First, the WTO ministerial in Cancun. Depending on how you look at it, this meeting is either absolutely critical or not at all important. Pascal Lamy, the trade minister for the European Union, and Bob Zoelleck have been trying to play down expectations for that meeting, in part because it's going to be very hard to get concrete results. We're right now at the mid-point of what has been termed the Development Round, which was launched in Doha in November 2001 with a firm promise that this time global trade talks would be much more in the interests of poor countries, and with a second promise that it would wrap up quickly in 2005.
We're now at the mid-point, and in fact very little concrete progress has been made. There was a recent important agreement on this vexing issue about how to square the interests of pharmaceutical companies and intellectual property in the north and access to life-saving medicines in the south, which was concluded going into these meetings, but there has been only missed deadlines and no progress on the sort of centerpiece issue of agriculture. Why does that matter? It is probably the most critical issue facing trade ministers with regard to the distribution of benefits from the global trading system, developing countries and developed countries.
The big items on the table are the subsidies that are paid by rich countries to their farmers, something on the order of $300 to $350 billion a year, more than the combined incomes of all of sub-Saharan Africa, and with, you know, staggering factoids out there, like each cow in the EU receives more in government subsidies per day than half the world's population lives on.
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