The New York Times

Wednesday November 24, 1999

Clinton Fails to Get World Leaders to Attend Seattle Trade Talks

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton has quietly tried -- and failed -- to persuade leaders of major countries to attend a huge trade conference in Seattle next week in order to break political deadlocks over workers' rights, agricultural subsidies and America's self-proclaimed authority to block low-cost imports.

Clinton's concerns were underscored Tuesday when negotiators for the 135 nations that will attend the conference abandoned their effort in Geneva to work out an agenda. Their failure calls into question whether Clinton can achieve many of his negotiating priorities.

At about the same time Tuesday afternoon, the White House gave up on its last-minute attempt to persuade the leaders of Japan, Brazil, the European Community and several developing countries to attend the ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, after several leaders said they had scheduling conflicts.

The purpose of the conference is to lay the groundwork for a global "Millennium Round" of trade negotiations, which could last for at least three years. The inability of the negotiators to reach an agreement on the agenda after weeks of trying reflects fundamental disagreements on some of the most politically sensitive economic issues around the globe.

Clinton, for example, wants Europe to abandon its huge subsidies for farmers, which he says are protectionist measures intended to cripple more efficient American producers. The Europeans and the Japanese have refused, and have said that any trade accord must include the question of protecting rural communities -- a code-word for protecting the livelihoods of the farmers who live in those nations.

Meanwhile, Clinton has angered developing nations like India and Brazil by insisting that the next round of trade talks take up, for the first time, the question of protections for workers -- allowing the W.T.O., for example, to ban the export of goods made by child labor.

Officials from developing nations say that is merely an effort by the United States and Europe to erect barriers against low-cost goods -- and to satisfy their trade unions. It is also an issue for Vice President Al Gore, who has come under intense pressure from unions, whose support he needs in the presidential election next year, to kill any trade negotiations that do not make workers' concerns the top priority.

Those are only two of the many festering disputes that have plagued the negotiations leading up to the Seattle session starting next Tuesday, which is intended only to begin a negotiating round, rather than settle any of the issues.

But the new head of the World Trade Organization, Mike Moore, a blunt-speaking former politician from New Zealand, warned recently that the talks were "in danger of failure." Tuesday, speaking in Geneva, he said trade ministers had gone as far as they could and that "it's now up to our political bosses to make this a success."

Several times during the last few weeks Clinton and his staff have tried to get some of those political bosses -- whether presidents or prime ministers -- to Seattle, hoping that the pressure of gathering them in one place would force several nations to compromise. They feared that trade and foreign ministers alone could not break the impasse.

But for weeks the White House got tangled up in the question of whom to invite, compiling lists and then abandoning them. "Every time we put together a list of names," a White House aide said, "it became clear that we would make 20 enemies."

In the end, to avoid the embarrassment of being explictly turned down, Clinton's top aides informally contacted Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi of Japan; Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission; President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa; President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil; Prime Minister John Howard of Australia and a small number of others.

Several officials said the one leader most interested in attending was the one Clinton would not talk to: President Fidel Castro of Cuba.

"We started too late and it just didn't work," one White House official said Tuesday, insisting that no formal invitations were ever extended and that Clinton had never placed calls directly to the leaders.

Negotiating "trade rounds" is always contentious business: the last big negotiation, which created the World Trade Organization from a weaker predecessor, took years longer than orginally scheduled and left many issues completely unaddressed. And any new negotations promise to be even more complex.

New members of the World Trade Organization -- soon to include China -- argue that special rules should be cut for countries most afflicted by poverty and long isolation from the world economy. And longtime members, like France, are convinced that the United States is using its economic rise and unchallenged global power to draft rules that play to the strengths of American industry.

Some of the most bitter arguments have surrounded questions of labor standards -- a particularly difficult issue for Vice President Gore.

"The W.T.O., in a formal sense, does not recognize that links between trade and labor exist," Charlene Barshefsky, the United States trade representative, said Tuesday. "This is not a position which can endure. It is intellectually indefensible, and it will over time weaken public support for the trading system."

But many other countries refuse to discuss labor issues, saying that they are not interested in having the World Trade Organizaton dictate how much workers get paid, whether they should be allowed to form unions, or even how old they must be.

On a recent visit to India, one of Ms. Barshefsky's top aides, Sue Esserman, declared that "great democracies ignore labor issues at their peril," but she failed to persuade India's leaders to engage in a global study intended to lead the World Trade Organization to start setting labor standards.

There are similar divisions on enforcing intellectual property rights and other features of past trade accords. Many developing nations, for example, want more time before they enforce copyrights, an alien concept in many parts of the world.

The result of these disagreements is that negotiators in Geneva could not even agree on the scope of the coming negotiations.