Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda

Agriculture is yet again causing contention in international trade negotiations. It caused long delays to the Uruguay round in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it is again proving to be the major stumbling block in the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations (formally known as the Doha Development Agenda, or DDA). This study builds on numerous recent analyses of the Doha Development Agenda and agricultural trade, including five very helpful books that appeared in 2004. One, edited by Aksoy and Beghin (2004), provides details of trends in global agricultural markets and policies, especially as they affect nine commodities of interest to developing countries. Another, edited by Ingco and Winters (2004), includes a wide range of analyses based on papers revised following a conference held just before the aborted WTO trade ministerial meeting in Seattle in 1999. The third, edited by Ingco and Nash (2004), provides a follow-up to the broad global perspective of the Ingco and winters volume: it explores a wide range of key issues and options in agricultural trade reform from a developing-country perspective. The fourth, edited by Anania, Bowman, Carter, and McCalla (2004), is a comprehensive, tenth-anniversary retrospective on the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture and numerous unilateral trade and subsidy reforms in developed, transition, and developing economies. And the fifth, edited by Jank (2004), focuses on implications for Latin America.