Now seven years after the Doha Round of negotiations were launched, the WTO continues its sisyphean effort to sell further trade deregulation to the world. During the week of July 21, trade ministers will gather in Geneva and take yet another last shot at moving the Doha talks toward conclusion.
As Tim Wise and Kevin Gallagher of the Global Development and Environment Institute write in the June 27 issue of The Guardian, the Doha Round offers little for poor countries - the very countries it was intended to help. And IATP has written recently about how the Doha Round will do nothing to address the global food crisis currently wreaking havoc around the world.
The 2002 Farm Bill has been highly criticized during the Doha negotiations. Are there changes in the 2008 Farm Bill that might help move the Doha Round negotiations forward? A new analysis by IATP's Sophia Murphy and Steve Suppan concludes that both the 2008 Farm Bill and the latest Doha Round agriculture proposals solidly maintain the status quo - requiring few changes to a global system tilted heavily towards the interests of agribusiness. Yet another reason why the outdated Doha Round talks need to be scrapped and new thinking brought forward on a fairer system of trade.
