Scope For Doha To Reduce Discrimination In Agricultural Markets

The vast majority of the world’s poorest households depend on farming for their livelihood, as would many of the rest had prospects in agriculture not been so bleak as to force them into non-farm activities in search of a higher income. Earnings from farming have been depressed in low-income countries partly because own-country policies typically have had a pro-urban, anti-agricultural bias, and partly because richer countries (including some developing countries) assist and protect their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Numerous developing country governments have made considerable progress over the past two decades in reducing their own sectoral and trade policy distortions, and many of them now believe high-income countries should reduce their remaining protectionism that harms developing country exports of farm (and textile) products. Indeed one of the key difficulties in the World Trade Organization’s (‘WTO’)1 current round of multilateral trade negotiations (known as the ‘the Doha Development Agenda’) is the fact that developing countries are calling for such commitments on farm policies before they will consider offering any further reform commitments of their own.