Doha Trade Round Talks Collapse

The wealthy industrial countries of Europe and North America have failed to reach an agreement on agricultural trade during the latest “last-ditch” talks aimed at saving the Doha Round of trade negotiations. World Trade Organization [WTO] director general Pascal Lamy, said, “We have missed a very important opportunity to prove that multilateralism works.” However, it’s no skin of the noses of the Yanks or the Euros, since the people who really suffer from their trade policies weren’t even in the room, subsistence farmers in poor countries.

The EU blames the US entirely. EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, who used to be part of Tony Blair’s inner circle until ethics charges undid him (twice), said, “What they're [the Americans] saying is that for every dollar that they strip out of their trade-distorting farm subsidies they want to be given a dollar’s worth of market access in developing country markets. That is not acceptable to developing countries and it's a principle that I on Europe's behalf certainly couldn't sign up to either.” And he’s right. America, the land of free enterprise, doesn’t merit a guarantee of market access that its products can’t win on their own.

That said, Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy has been distorting trade with the developing world for decades, and there is little desire to get rid of it. The European Economic Community (as the EU’s forerunner was known) protected inefficient French and Italian farmers at the expense of German and Benelux industrial workers in exchange for letting the Germans drop much of their war guilt and for letting the little countries of the Lowlands into the club at all. Times are much different now, and the CAP does much more harm than good – indeed, if it ever did any good at all.

Because of the quirks of the US constitution and recent legislation, the Bush administration loses the “fast-track” negotiating authority Congress has given it in a year’s time. Until then, Congress has agreed to vote up or down on any trade deal the White House brings to it. After that, amendments are possible. An extension of this authority is not even discussed in serious Washington circles. So if the deal isn’t done now, it is dead until after the Americans have a new president, which will happen on January 20, 2009.

Trade liberalization in agriculture is seen as the ticket out of poverty for a good billion people or so in Africa, Latin America and Asia. People who live on a dollar a day have a definite advantage over people who spend more than that on their morning coffee. It will be hard on US and European farmers, and for that reason, it isn’t moving forward very fast. Still as John Hilary, director of campaigns and policy at War on Want, said, “Any chance of a genuinely pro-poor outcome was lost long ago, and the deal on the table would have caused great damage to developing countries.” In order to matter in negotiations, one has to be at the table when they occur. Doha has failed the poorest in this regard.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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