No one wants the World Trade Organization.
More than a month after December's WTO ministerial conference in
Hong Kong, which was supposed to decide on a venue for global
commerce's next biennial jamboree in 2007, no city has yet
volunteered to hold it.
The baggage associated with hosting such a meeting organizing and
providing accommodation and security for thousands of delegates,
journalists and campaigners is daunting enough.
That's before considering the possibility of the talks collapsing
or violent protests as happened in both Seattle and Cancún,
Mexico costing the host city financially as well as potentially
tarnishing its image, as pictures of rioters fighting police beam
around the globe.
"To do the last WTO meeting, it took us 18 months of preparation
and cost us an incredible amount of resources," said Hong Kong
Commerce Minister John Tsang. "This is not something you want to do
every year."
Traditionally, a few names are considered before the WTO General
Council announces a host city for the meeting. The last two hosts,
Hong Kong and Cancún, volunteered more than two years before the
event. Hong Kong said it needed at least a year's advance notice of
exact dates because it was so complicated to organize the 10,000
attendees.
So with the next full-blown ministerial likely to be in late 2007,
the clock is already ticking.
"Who would want to host something where there's such a high chance
of failure?" said Philippe de Pontet, an analyst at the Eurasia
Group in Washington, D.C. "There's a lot of negatives."
In Hong Kong, more than 1,000 people were rounded up at the end of
the meeting after an anti-globalization march turned into a riot,
when hundreds of protesters broke through police lines and tried to
storm the convention center where ministers were still
negotiating.
A survey by a Hong Kong research organization found that before the
meeting, 57 percent of 500 residents asked thought the conference
would benefit the territory. But afterward, that figure dropped to
just 12 percent.
"Hong Kong people are not satisfied with the multimillions of
dollars being spent and the inconvenience caused, without there
being a real return," said Chris Farquhar of Market Insights Group,
which is based in Hong Kong.
Tsang estimated that it cost the territory more than $38 million to
host the event.
But WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell played down the significance of
the trouble in Hong Kong, pointing out that it was less severe than
at previous conferences.
"While this was nothing to sneeze at, it was certainly less than on
previous occasions," Rockwell said.
The Seattle meeting in 1999 saw the worst trouble, when WTO talks
collapsed after five days of anti-globalization riots that hurt the
city's image and caused $3 million in damage. In Cancún,
demonstrators battled with police and threw objects and even raw
sewage in an attempt to crack a security perimeter around the
meeting.
Officials say Singapore a WTO standby, where the commerce body
had its first ministerial conference in 1996 could host the 2007
meeting, while Qatar may also volunteer.
Geneva remains the default location, but nothing is
confirmed.
"It's true that we've had some concerns about certain meetings,
mainly because of the importance of the delegations," said Geneva
police spokesman Christophe Zawadzki, adding that the city has not
yet put all arrangements in place for hosting a major WTO interim
conference at the end of April.
But some analysts say these major events have less chance of making
progress in liberalizing world trade because of the complications
of conducting negotiations under close scrutiny.
Major players are preferring to meet in small groups in Geneva or
other locations, such as this week's gathering on the sidelines of
the World Economic Forum in Davos, where they avoid some of the
media spotlight that is focused on full ministerials.
"It is becoming increasingly difficult to make political decisions
at the ministerial conference, and so the most powerful WTO members
and the WTO secretariat are using other avenues to reach
agreement," said Carin Smaller, a trade expert at the Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minneapolis-based research
organization.
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