Food insecurity in the developing world killed the Doha round of trade talks today.
After 3 decades of pressure from trade negotiators, the World Bank, and the IMF to sacrifice local agriculture and accept imports of subsidized agricultural products from the developed world, and after repeated occurrences of food crises in developing nations that agreed, developing nations today killed the Doha Round of WTO negotiations over this issue. The story from Center for Economic and Policy Research ("CEPR") is here. I provided some lurid background anecdotes in this earlier post.
According to the CEPR release, the US industries that hoped to gain the most from the Doha round were pharmaceuticals, agriculture, telecommunications, and financial services. Except for agriculture, it appears to me that "exports" from none of these industries would create or support substantial employment in the US. Making the negotiations problematic from the US side were the facts that the President's Congressional authority to negotiate expired in June 2007 and the US was proposing reductions in US agricultural subsidies that were incompatible with the farm bill recently passed over Bush's veto.
Skeptic
For a much more extensive report on why the Doha Round talks collapsed, with numerous links to other sources, go here. According to this article, food was not the only hot issue for developing nations. West African nations made a strong push to get rid of subsidies to US cotton growers. The idea of "food sovereignty" was further expanded in one initiative to include health care, education, water, telecommunications, and energy, all of which were described as human rights over which a nation could not properly surrender control.
Some developing nations were angry that the developed world would not permit them to provide tariff protections to local industries during their getting-established phase--a tactic they pointed out had been heavily relied on by the USA and others during their industrialization phases. Negotiators were also foreseeing that effective solutions to global climate change and the current financial crisis may clash with WTO prohibitions.
Underlying all this was the perception that the promised benefits of free trade, structural realignment, and globalization had not arrived in the developing world, and that current projections of benefits are now much more modest than the halcyon projections of yesteryear. Many other issues are also covered in the article, which I highly recommend.
Skeptic
Australia and Brazil were among nations that were hoping to use the Doha round to reduce or eliminate US susidies to farmers, and they are trying to revive the negotiations.
Skeptic
US family farmers' elation at death of Doha round is reported here.
Skeptic
in Free trade, Globalization
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