Trade Lobbyists: Agenda Doesn’t Stop With Doha
Roll Call Staff
Business lobbyists who were supportive of the now-collapsed Doha round of World Trade Organization talks are putting their disappointment aside and placing a positive spin on the outlook for other upcoming trade deals. But opponents of those measures say the Doha breakdown is a sign that the tide is starting to shift in their favor.
Ron Sorini, a former chief U.S. textile negotiator who is now a senior vice president at the firm Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, said the collapse of WTO talks will put greater emphasis on narrower free-trade agreements.
“U.S. trade policy is going to have to shift now from a multilateral approach to a more bilateral one,” Sorini said.
Sorini’s clients include the American Apparel and Footwear Association and the Outdoor Industry Association, which support such upcoming trade agreements as permanent normalized trade relations with Vietnam and a free-trade agreement with Peru.
The breakdown in WTO talks “sends a strong message that the U.S. is going to stick to its principles on trade negotiations,” he said, adding that such a message should make it clear to Members that U.S. negotiators are “responsible. We can trust them. Skeptics in Congress will see that the administration is being responsible.”
But Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, said the WTO collapse was a sign of a greater world-wide “political backlash” against the current free-trade model. That backlash, she said, will only give her side further momentum as it seeks to defeat measures like Vietnam and Peru.
The reality Congress has to face, she said, is that broader constituencies, including small businesses, farmers and the religious community — “groups that weren’t in this fight two years ago — are in it, against more of the same. ... My suspicion [is that] the political appetite is calling for a hiatus, a prudent pause on trade. I’ve never seen so many House races” in which candidates are focusing on trade.
Wallach agreed there would be a greater focus on regional trade agreements because of the WTO collapse, but she said the attention will come from both sides.
“Will it make it easier to have them put into place? No,” she said.
Bill Lane, Washington, D.C., director of governmental affairs for Caterpillar Inc., turned to a boxing analogy to sum up his thoughts of the trade fights. Boxer Floyd Patterson, he said, “was knocked down more than anyone and said it’s not about how many times you get knocked down but how many times you get up.”
The Doha round collapse, Lane said, “is a setback” but “it’s my belief that the Congress and the administration are going to be even more determined than they were before” and that they are more likely to move on the Peru and Vietnam deals before the end of the session.
R.D. Folsom, a senior director at Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates, said he doesn’t see much impact from the WTO stalemate.
“If anything, I think it would have a positive effect” for Peru and Vietnam, he said.
The Senate Finance Committee has scheduled to mark up both bills on Thursday.
Folsom, who also serves as executive director of the Comprehensive Market Access Coalition, said his message to Capitol Hill in urging support for those agreements is that “there is a chance now. We don’t want to lose all of this. We’ve got to have something.”
Brigitte Schmidt Gwyn, the top trade lobbyist for the Business Roundtable, said the group is disappointed about the current WTO situation.
But, she added, “with the remainder of the trade agenda, a stalled WTO agenda puts even more pressure and emphasis to move forward to other” measures such as Vietnam and Peru.
But one lobbyist who is working for clients that support upcoming trade agreements said that the collapse of the Doha round should mean little to the other trade priorities. The recent vote on a free-trade agreement with Oman — which passed the House 221-205, more narrowly than expected — will have a bigger impact on the Vietnam and Peru agreements, this lobbyist said.
“It’s created some distrust and ill will,” the lobbyist said. “It creates a higher bar for the willingness to schedule a trade vote if [Members] will have to go through that type of dynamic.”
Bill Hawkins, a senior fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, which has opposed recent agreements such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement, said looking ahead to next year, the collapse of the Doha round could hurt the White House’s chances of renewing its own trade promotion authority, which expires next year.
“One of the arguments for renewing it would be, ‘We’ve got Doha to deal with,’” Hawkins said.
Hawkins added that Vietnam should be another contentious measure. “It’s another big country full of cheap labor and no buying power,” he said.
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