Lamy: “Not Where We Wanted To Be” In WTO Round 28/03/2010 by Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)World Trade Organization Director General Pascal Lamy on Friday said that there are “technically no insurmountable obstacles” in resolving the long-struggling Doha Round of trade liberalisation talks this year, but that this timeline was always a political rather than technical one. In the so-called WTO stock-taking, regarding the size of the gaps that remain “we are not where we wanted to be,” he said in a press briefing on 26 March, explaining that there are two categories of issues that remain: negotiation areas where gaps have been numbered and where options are on the table, and negotiation areas where the gaps are “not in a shape that allows for political arbitration.” On issues related to the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), several sources said there have been no major breakthroughs but that consultations are being held. Meanwhile, a new WTO report on trade prospects for 2010 predicts a 9.5 percent expansion. This expansion will “help recover some, but by no means all, of the ground lost in 2009 when the global economic crisis sparked a 12.2 percent contraction,” said a WTO press release. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window) Related "Lamy: “Not Where We Wanted To Be” In WTO Round" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.