Deal-making at the WTO

Deal-making at the WTO The 26 trade ministers who gathered on the margins of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting at Davos earlier this week at the request of the Swiss government have given a clear signal for the full resumption of the negotiations of the Doha round of the World Trade Organisation. But what kind of “development” agreement is this going to end up in?

Last July, the WTO director general Pascal Lamy suspended the five-year old negotiations after the US refused to discuss what it was prepared to do to reduce its domestic farm subsidies. That the US’ farm subsidies are at the core of major distortions in the global farm trade, especially in cotton, is well known. The WTO’s highest dispute resolution body had pronounced unambiguously that the domestic and export subsidies provided by the US have caused major distortions in global trade. At Davos, Benin’s trade minister Issifou Soumanou Moudjaidou told his counterparts in the closed-door green room meeting that he was wearing black as a sign of mourning and protest for the WTO doing nothing to address the cotton subsidies provided by the US government that are increasingly claiming the lives of hundreds of poor farmers in his country.