Title:	Reforming Agricultural Trade for Developing Countries
Authors:	Alex F. McCalla & John Nash
Keywords:	World Trade Organization Developing countries
Issue Date:	2007
Publisher:	The World Bank
Description:	This is one volume of a two-volume set titled Reforming Agricultural Trade for Developing Countries. The first volume is subtitled Key Issues for a ProDevelopment Outcome of the Doha Round, because the chapters are for the most part focused on specific concerns that are being encountered in the agricultural negotiations, and on strategies for dealing with them to arrive at a final agreement that will significantly spur growth and reduce poverty in developing countries. The companion volume is subtitled Quantifying the Impact of Multilateral Trade Reform. It comprises chapters that take different approaches to modeling trade reform and quantifying the resulting benefits and costs to various players in the negotiations. The overview chapter of that volume explains the differences in results that come out of these different approaches, and compares them to some other recent estimates of the gains from global trade reform. With few exceptions, the papers in these two volumes were first presented at a workshop, “The Developing Countries, Agricultural Trade, and the WTO,” sponsored by the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium, the World Bank, and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, held in Whistler, British Columbia, in June 2002. Most of the papers have been revised and updated for this book. At the time of the workshop the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations was in its early days and a negotiating framework had not been proposed, so each paper invented its own scenario for evaluation. Considering the amount of time that has elapsed since the conference, there might be some concern that the papers are now of limited, mainly historical, value. This is not the case. Progress in the Doha Round has been fitful and slow and is now years behind schedule. The Cancun Ministerial Meeting in 2003 ended without agreement on a negotiating framework as some developing countries walked out because of a lack of movement on agriculture. The next deadline was the Ministerial Meeting in Hong Kong in December 2005. It too ended with a very limited agreement, the most significant accomplishment being the setting of a 2013 deadline for ending agricultural export subsidies. More recently, the WTO was forced to call for a de facto suspension of the Round, due primarily to the failure of members to agree on the next steps in the agricultural negotiations. Agricultural issues remain unresolved and continue to be of central importance to getting the Round back on track.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/46214
ISBN:	978-0-8213-6496-3
Appears in Collections:	Rural Development Studies

Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.