Free Economics Dissertations - Europe And America During The Cancun Conference Exhibited A Common Narrow
Europe and America during the Cancun conference exhibited a common narrow minded selfish defence of local interest groups. The US was unwilling to curb cotton subsidies which hits heavily, at poor country producers. The European Union remained attached to its own farm subsidies. Japan stayed in defence of its own heavily subsidised rice farmers. The group of 22 developing nations deliberately brought the talks to an end, despite much evidence that they had a lot to gain from lowering trade barriers against each other even than persuading the industrialised nations to lower their own barriers.
Geneva (2004)
The meeting of the World Trade Organisation General Council at Geneva was created with the hope of reaching frameworks to guide further negotiations, which had been the hope at the Cancun meeting. All the 147 WTO members nations that attended, reached an agreement on a framework at midnight 31st July 2004. This agreement setting out the broad parameters for eventual and detailed agreements on each of the several issues such as Agriculture and Non-Agricultural Market Access, will allow substantive negotiations on the Doha Development Agenda to get going. The key point particularly relating to developing countries were set out as follows:
There was an agreement to abolish all forms of agricultural export subsidies by a date to be determined during the course of the negotiations.
In response to the concerns rose, three of the ‘New Issues’ of investment, competition and transparency in government procurement will not be negotiated in the current round of talks.
There will be an agreement on the fourth ‘New Issue’ trade facilitation. This will bring important benefits to developing countries in the form of increased efficiency in trade flows.
On domestic support for agriculture, the EU, US and other developed countries will have to harmonise their varying forms of trade-distorting domestic support and make a down payment of a 20% reduction.
On cotton, developing countries were pushing for special attention to be given to their cotton exports, which are hampered by developed country subsidies of their own industries. The membership, including the US, has consequently committed itself to tackling these cotton problems ambitiously, expeditiously, and specifically, within the agricultural negotiations.
Not much progress was made with improvements on market access Agricultural and Non-Agricultural goods.
The next ministerial meeting is scheduled to take place in Hong Kong in December 2005.
Summary and Conclusions
This article looks at the birth of the DOHA Development agenda, with regard to what the World Trade Organisation was setup to do right from the very beginning. It identifies the reasons for the trade talks at Doha 2001, Cancun 2003, and Geneva 2004.
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