Embassy Row

Talking trade

Brazil’s ambassador yesterday sounded optimistic over prospects of avoiding the collapse of global trade talks designed to lower tariffs and promote economic growth, a week after U.S. officials criticized Brazil and other developing nations for blocking progress on the six-year-old negotiations.

“I think on the Doha round, we are extremely close to an agreement,” Ambassador Antonio Patriota told the Brazil-U.S. Business Council, referring to the round of World Trade Organization talks that began in 2001 in Doha, Qatar.

“I think we have seen sufficient movement on the part of all participants to be relatively assured that we will be able to reach a satisfactory result very, very soon.”

Mr. Patriota added that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and President Bush had a phone conversation about the Doha round on Tuesday evening.

Last week, U.S. officials complained that Brazil, India and other developing nations risked scuttling the talks by trying to exempt their industrialized markets from tariff cuts. The new demand from the poorer nations surfaced after the United States and the European Union moved closer to meeting earlier demands for cuts in agricultural subsidies.

“I don’t know how you can read the actions of these countries as anything other than trying to take a giant step backward,” Sean Spicer, spokesman for U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab, told Bloomberg News service.

The Doha round could add $96 billion to the global economy, according to World Bank estimates.

Ukraine: Take two

Like a bad soap opera, infighting among the cast undermined the first production in Ukraine, but things will go much more smoothly in “Orange Revolution: The Sequel,” according to a top adviser to Prime Minister-designate Yulia Tymoshenko.

“The political situation is much more favorable this time around, and I think everyone in the Orange Revolution coalition learned some difficult and painful lessons from what happened in 2005,” Hryhoriy Nemyria, foreign policy aide to Mrs. Tymoshenko, told our correspondent David R. Sands on a Washington visit this week.

Mrs. Tymoshenko, the big winner in last month’s parliamentary elections, and President Viktor Yushchenko were the key figures in the stirring popular protests of the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution, forming a pro-Western government committed to economic and political reforms.

But Mrs. Tymoshenko lasted barely seven months as prime minister in 2005 under Mr. Yushchenko, as the Orange forces broke up amid personal feuds, policy clashes and charges of corruption.

The revived coalition staged a comeback in the Sept. 30 vote, outpolling the pro-Russian party of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

Mr. Nemyria said that Mrs. Tymoshenko this time around will enjoy a small working majority in the 450-seat parliament, as opposed to the hostile legislature she inherited in early 2005. She will also have a much bigger say in choosing her key Cabinet ministers, he added.

Mrs. Tymoshenko also has pledged to reach out to the defeated opposition, creating a new deputy prime minister’s post charged with legislative relations.

Mr. Nemyria said the resuscitated Orange coalition also will benefit from what President Bush might call the “bigotry of low expectations.” The exhilaration of the Orange Revolution produced high hopes among ordinary Ukrainians that Mr. Yushchenko and Mrs. Tymoshenko could never meet.

“People were expecting miracles then,” Mr. Nemyria said, “but now the hopes are not nearly so high. They overestimated what we could do then, and I think they are underestimating what we can achieve now.”

• Call Embassy Row at 202/636-3297, fax 202/832-7278 or e-mail jmorrison@ washingtontimes.com.