BY SEAN HEALY

The S11 protests against the World Economic Forum summit in Melbourne may have claimed a quite unintended, but welcome, victim: a quick launch of a new round of World Trade Organisation talks.

The Seattle ministerial meeting of the WTO was due to launch a new “Millennium Round” of talks on further trade liberalisation last December, but was prevented from doing so by a combination of mass protest outside and an outcry by Third World negotiators inside.

Since then, WTO officials, Western governments and large transnational corporations have been pushing for a quick relaunch, either this year or early next, before the painstakingly built “consensus” among governments for a new round breaks down altogether.

Now, however, the prospect of a quick relaunch is fading fast. Third World governments are baulking, demanding guarantees that a new round will address their concerns at the WTO's lack of democracy, and US policy on a new round is unsettled by the approaching presidential election.

WTO officials are also worried that a formal relaunch, through a ministerial meeting attended by thousands of senior politicians and trade bureaucrats, would be a lightning rod for the rising international movement against corporate globalisation, as it was in Seattle.

The massive actions in Melbourne against the World Economic Forum, and the demonstrations beginning on September 26 against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Prague, have consolidated official fears that any major meeting of capitalist decision-makers will attract large-scale and militant protest.

Only one country has offered to host such a meeting — the repressive Arab-Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar — and officials are worried that a trade round launched in such a country would be a public relations disaster for the WTO, which is desperate to win legitimacy in the eyes of the world's peoples.

Instead, the major powers that run the WTO are likely to try to expand the scope of negotiations on existing agreements, adding new issues, such as new pro-corporate rules on investment, as they go.

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