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The global trading system at risk? Nicole Boldt assesses the 'crisis' of the Doha Delevopment Round.

Article Excerpt
In late July 2006, the General Council of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) supported the recommendations of Director-General Pascal Lamy to suspend the latest round of multilateral trade negotiations indefinitely.

Lamy made the recommendation after the six most powerful agricultural trading members--the European Union, United States, India, Brazil, Japan and Australia (the G6)--failed to come up with a solution to the problems that had prevented the Trade Negotiations Committee (i.e. the entire WTO membership) from making progress with the negotiations in late June/early July. At the time of the earlier setback, Lamy declared the negotiating round and the WTO to be 'in crisis'. With a mandate to conduct 'intensive and wide-ranging' consultation with WTO members, he came to the conclusion that there was no imminent prospect of resolution.

The crux of the problem rests on the inability of member states to agree on the modalities for trade in agricultural goods and non-agricultural market access (NAMA) that would operate as the framework for determining such things as tariff and subsidy levels. This stalemate is symptomatic of serious issues confronting the WTO and by extension the future of the global trading system.

At the forefront of these problems is how to accommodate the divergent and often competing interests of all 149 member-states, many of which are developing countries with an extremely small share in the global trading market but a very large share of the world's population and those living in abject poverty.

The Doha Development...

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