jackthurston.com

It must be frustrating being the President of the European Commission: a whole lot of responsibility but very little power. When Jose Manuel Barroso meets George W Bush at the White House next week he may be able to offer some advice to a US President who has just lost control of Congress and is watching his Iraq strategy slip further into chaos.

On the agenda is climate change, international security and global trade. Bush is currently the world’s leading climate change denier and the chances of him recanting are as good as those of snowball in hell - or the polar ice caps, the way things are going. On international security, the EU lacks a standing army and even a foreign minister, so Barroso has very little to offer here. It is only trade policy that the two men can use this high level meeting to achieve something concrete: sealing a deal that has so far eluded their respective trade negotiators at the WTO in Geneva. Presidential ‘fast track’ Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) will expire in a matter of months, and so if there is to be a deal on Bush’s watch, it needs to be made now. (more…)

I was invited to speak at the World Trade Organisation Public Forum, held last month at the WTO’s headquarters on the shore of Lake Geneva. (More on the questionable wisdom of locating a pro-free trade institution in highly protectionist Switzerland will follow…) In the opening plenary session we were addressed by WTO Director General, the Prime Minister of Lesotho and the Chairman of Unilever, but one man stole the show: Ted Turner, the billionaire media mogul turned philanthropist. He’s is a fascinating character. A straight-taking maverick good ol’ boy, once married to Jane Fonda, he sports a pencil-thin white moustache and looks as though he’s most at ease on the saddle of his favourite old Paint, roaming the half million acre Vermejo Park Ranch in New Mexico. Ted owns more land in the US than any other citizen. Ted’s pitch, as simple as it was unexpected, is that energy crops offer a double-barrelled fix to two of the most pressing challenges that beset the global community: the stalemate in the WTO’s ‘Doha Round’ of trade liberalisation talks and (more importantly) our dependency on fossil fuels that cause global warming. (more…)