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Photo: World Trade Organizaion 2 December 2009

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - In a highly publicized event, its opening marred by street violence, the Seventh Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has brought together government officials from 153 countries in Geneva for three days to discuss trade.

On the other side of town, delegations of experts on foreign policy, military affairs and arms control from Russia and the US are meeting to hammer out the details of a treaty that will reduce their countries’ nuclear arsenals.

For a world with more trade

Trade ministers from the WTO’s 153 member countries have been meeting in Geneva for their biennial conference  amidst the worst recession in 80 years, with trade volumes down more than 10 percent  in 2009 compared to last year, according to WTO figures.

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy did not put the resumption of the stalled Doha round of trade talks at the top of the agenda. The theme of the conference is “The WTO, the Multilateral Trading System and the Current Global Economic Environment.”

The first full day of work 1 December was dedicated to a review of WTO activities, including the Doha Work Programme, and day two was spent on the WTO’s contribution to recovery, growth and development.

Highlights and issues raised at the conference:

• Doha: everyone appears to agree that the Doha trade talks must go forward and be concluded in 2010, if possible. No new breakthroughs were announced, though talks for senior officials are scheduled for December in Geneva.
• European Agriculture Minister Mariann Fischer Boel, at her final WTO session, says she believes “we have made a great deal of progress in agriculture”, adding that she expects the long-standing banana fight to be resolved very soon, with a draft text yet this week.
• Russian accession to WTO: The Russian Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina held talks with Lamy on Russia’s accession to the WTO as well as with US Trade Representative Ron Kirk, who later, according to a statement issued, “expressed the “United States’ continuing support for and readiness to assist Russia’s individual accession to the WTO.”
• Ocean fisheries should become a WTO concern, marine scientists said in a letter to the conference, which addresses the urgency of finding a solution to overfishing and pollution in the world’s oceans, and suggests that a separate deal may be concluded more easily than as part of the Doha round.
• Despite the difficulties for trade, Canadian Trade Minister Stockwell Day pointed out that the least-developed countries’ share of world trade has more than doubled, to 1.1 percent, since 2000.
• Iran revived its 13-year-old application for WTO membership.

For a world with fewer nuclear weapons

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start) expires 5 December. US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have met three times this year while on other official business to discuss Start, underscoring the importance the talks merit. A major stumbling block to a deal was removed with the Obama decision in September to “reconsider” a European missile shield that the US had planned on installing in the Czech Republic and Poland.

The latest round of negotiations began in earnest 9 November, and the sticking points are the usual ones: how to accurately count the two countries’ nuclear arsenals, and how to verify that each side sticks to the agreement once it is signed.

Neither side wants to conduct the negotoations in public and few official statements are being issued this week.

Start was signed in 1991, months before the former Soviet Union collapsed. The treaty managed to reduce the danger of nuclear war by cutting the number of  nuclear missiles each side could have to 6,000 and “delivery systems” to under 1,600. Today, the US is estimated to have fewer than 3,700 deployed warheads, while Russia has 4,237. Both sides destroyed weapons and delivery systems to comply with the treaty. The US destroyed 365 B-52 nuclear-capable bombers by cutting them up into pieces with a giant saw, then left the pieces lying around in the Arizona desert for three months so that Russian satellites could verify their destruction.

Links to other sites: Financial Times (subscription),Forbes, Itar-Tass, The Guardian