No 5: Agriculture Negotiations at the WTO: Doha Analysis Report
Agricultural Trade and Sustainable Development Series • Agriculture Report 5
This paper is the second report of series II detailing the developments in the agriculture trade negotiations currently underway at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The report series is being prepared by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD).
This report, issued in January 2002, is designed to provide an update on the negotiating process since the completion of the fourth WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar, from 9-14 November, 2002. It also seeks to set the context and assesses some of the possible developments during the second phase of the agriculture negotiations based on what most Members interpret as an agreement on a “new round” of trade talks.
For now, Ministers have decided that agriculture together with other seven mandated negotiation tracks are pooled in a so-called ‘single undertaking’, meaning that there will be only one comprehensive round of negotiations, whose agreed results will then be binding as a whole for each Member. In addition, all negotiation tracks within this ‘single undertaking’ are subject to the same deadline (1 January 2005) by which the trade round is to be concluded. As this approach opens the door for a wide range of trade-offs, this and subsequent reports will further elaborate on the dynamics in the main non-agricultural negotiations in order to enable better ongoing assessment of the possible outcomes of the round of negotiations with respect to agriculture. Furthermore, progress in areas such as intellectual property rights, environment and implementation can have direct impacts on the global farming sector and thus have been analysed in more depth.
This report is divided into five sections:
- Section 1 is a brief introduction setting the agriculture negotiations in the overall context of activities at the WTO.
- Section 2 focuses on the themes within the current negotiations that have been identified as showing most significance for influencing European trade policy-making, providing descriptive and analytical detail of expressed positions.
- Section 3 provides a brief analysis of the outcomes of the Fourth WTO Ministerial in general and, particularly, with regard to agriculture as well as other elements of the Doha Declaration directly linked to international agricultural trade.
- Section 4 deals with the new language on environment embodied in the Doha Declaration and highlights possible implications by providing a brief analysis and a summary of reactions from key WTO Members as well as environmental organisations.
- Section 5 looks ahead at the emerging issues in connection with the future negotiations in agriculture itself as well as the design of the negotiation mechanisms of the new trade round as a whole.
The methodology used in compiling this report combined comprehensive in-house analytical work as well as extensive outreach to country delegates based in Geneva and representatives of local non-governmental organisations. As already provided in the previous report, the quick references now include information on the importance of trade and agricultural trade for each country. This is designed to assist readers in assessing the relative importance of trade issues for that country. These are included as appendices. To enable readers to conduct their own assessments more easily, the full text of the Doha Declaration has also been annexed to the report, together with an EC non-paper. Other non-papers were used in writing this report but could not be annexed for reasons of confidentiality.