Stanton, Emms & Sia

Rebooting the WTO Doha Round – A Strategic Review of the Opportunities and Challenges to Move Forward from July 2006 (The ‘Jakarta Protocol’)

This senior management briefing considers what needs to be done to resurrect the WTO Doha Round of negotiations on agriculture after the failure of the initial 6-party talks in late July 2006. It examines the new risks and challenges that have arisen from the events that led up to this failure, which could now lead to failure of any future discussions on liberalising the world’s agriculture markets, unless dealt with, and what is needed to reboot the negotiations, i.e. a new protocol – the proposed “Jakarta Protocol”.

Today, broad-based concerns exist over the appropriateness of the foundations of Doha Round of discussions on agriculture because they are based on a premise that is more relevant to trade in manufactured products that are, in the main, produced and traded by larger business operating in industries that are far less fragmented than the agriculture and agrifood businesses.

Additionally, although the Doha round was supposed to be a “development” round, the emotive link between agriculture and rural economic development was not properly understood or considered when the initial 6-party discussions were established. For the Developing World, this emotive aspect arises from the significant strategic differences that exist between the Developed World and  Developing World’s agriculture, agribusiness sectors and rural area economies and the impact of these differences on the negotiations, in particular the reality of unequal bargaining powers.

The now failed discussions have publicly revealed the self interested attitudes, bargaining strategies and pressures that were bound to cause failure of the Round on agriculture at some stage in future. This is possibly a good thing but it could also lead to a destructive attitude (amongst the Developing World) towards future discussions. As a result, something needs to be done on this and done very quickly.

The problems that are now faced by the Round on agriculture will likely be exacerbated by the situation that now exists at the UN over what is now being seen by much of the world as the undemocratic actions of the UN Security Council over Lebanon (and longer  standing disagreements over Iraq). There is now a political risk that the WTO and UN could now be “lumped” into the same camp, i.e. as world bodies that don’t work in a democratic manner for the interests of all of their “members as a body”.   

Issues considered by the briefing include the size and nature of the differences that exist between agriculture in the Developed and Developing Worlds, the risks that arise from issues such as the lack of transparency of negotiator constraints, bargaining power strengths and weaknesses, fair trade versus free trade, the impact of trend towards developing new technical barriers to trade, the impact of multinational corporations, the impact of aid programs, the real impact of using local culture to protect protectionism, the impact of tariffs and non-tariff measures and the challenges of developing entrepreneurial and market oriented businesses in the agricultural sectors under known market conditions across the world.