ARTHUR DUNKEL was dedicated to free trade and did more than anyone to bring it about. Despite fierce opposition, the unassuming Swiss negotiator drove the Uruguay round of trade talks to remove subsidies and quotas on a wide range of goods and services.
The talks dominated Dunkel’s final years as director-general of Gatt, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. It took nearly four years to get them started and the four-year timetable had to be extended by three years before an agreement was signed in 1994. The liberalisation added an estimated $300 billion a year to world trade. The talks ended under the aegis of Dunkel’s successor, the former EU Commissioner Peter Sutherland, nine months after Dunkel retired, but the agreement was his achievement.
Dunkel had been director-general for two years when the idea for global trade talks emerged in 1982. The talks started at Punta del Este in 1986 with almost 100 countries that accounted for $1 trillion — 80 per cent of the world’s trade. Dunkel extended the discussions to include services, investment and intellectual property, but talks frequently stalled as countries dug their toes in over agriculture.
From his office overlooking Lake Geneva — the talks never returned to Uruguay — Dunkel progressed by a shrewd mix of diplomacy and doggedness. His coup came in December 1991 when he distilled the thousands of pages of opposing submissions into a 500-page document that became known as the Dunkel Draft.
It was typical of his detailed approach but it was a gamble. It contained no alternatives, simply his proposals for removing barriers to trade. France denounced it, the EU criticised its farming proposals, Japan and Korea resisted opening their rice markets, the US rejected the patent provisions, and even the Swiss objected to it. But the tactic worked, and the talks, already over-running by a year, resumed, with the urbane Dunkel chain-smoking his Gitanes through meetings that extended into the early hours.
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His slightly shambling, academic appearance and gentle manner helped to produce compromise but it came amid an escalating trade war. The US threatened to triple duties on French wine and other imports and retaliated against European steel exports. With French farmers rioting, Dunkel brokered a peace in which the EU backed down, and his draft underpinned the agreement signed in Morocco in 1994.
He was determined not to see a repeat of the protectionism that had caused recession in the 1930s when his own father, a textile designer, had had to move from Switzerland to Lisbon to seek work. His parents were German- speaking, and being brought up in Portugal before going to a French school in Switzerland allowed Dunkel to negotiate in many languages. He spoke Spanish as well as English.
After a degree in commerce and economics at Lausanne in 1956, Dunkel joined the Swiss Federal Office for Foreign Economic Affairs in Berne. He remained there for 20 years, covering OECD matters and, from 1971 to 1976, world trade policy. He had been Switzerland’s permanent representative at Gatt from 1973 and in 1976 became its representative on trade agreements with the rank of ambassador. He was thus the natural choice to head Gatt in 1980 but its future was uncertain. The big countries were bypassing Gatt, preferring bilateral settlements that were distorting; subsidies and quotas were expanding.
Gatt had no powers to enforce its rulings and preferred “neutral” negotiators from Switzerland or Scandinavia rather than from big trading nations. Dunkel chose to recruit from the powerful countries and set about reorganising the cumbersome infrastructure.
His first big battle was for the renewal of the Multi Fibre Agreement where the French and British were being protectionist. Resolving this ensured Gatt’s future but it had to cope with fresh disputes, including US opposition to Canadian foreign investment limits and Western objections to Japan’s closed markets.
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Dunkel paid close attention to Third World views of agricultural exports, and after Eastern European countries rejected Communism, he lobbied the West to open trade with them.
After leaving Gatt in 1993, he ran a consultancy advising on trade and helping countries to join the World Trade Organisation. In 1997 the WTO appointed him to a three-man panel examining the dispute between the EU and US over investment in Cuba.
He had been a professor of economics at the universities of Geneva (since 1983) and Fribourg (since 1987) and continued to lecture in retirement. He also joined the board of Nestlé and chaired a commission on trade for the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce.
Among his honours was the US Consumers for World Trade award and the Freedom Prize from the Max Schmidheiny Foundation.
Dunkel’s wife, Christiane Müller-Cerda, whom he married in 1957, predeceased him. He is survived by a son and daughter.
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Arthur Dunkel, trade negotiator, was born on August 26, 1932. He died on June 8, 2005, aged 72.