Negotiations start for the WTO’s Doha Round

After nearly 14 months of stalemate, negotiations for the Doha round of World Trade organisation (WTO) have finally begun again at the headquarter of multilateral trading body in Geneva on Monday. The development came just 10 days after trade ministers from 30 members of the WTO at the New Delhi meeting finally broke the impasse that was created after failure of talks last year.

Presently, trade officials from the major economies have started formal negotiations, in an attempt to create a common ground on critical points like safeguard mechanisms and farm subsidies, the two issues that led to the stalemate last year.

The forum would be concentrating not only on multilateral talks but negotiators will also engage themselves in a lot of bilateral meetings aimed at developing common strategies towards key issues. Indian and Brazilian negotiators would once again try to remain on the same page on the issue of protecting the farmers from the developing world.

Negotiations broke off last year after India rejected the safeguards being proposed by the US which could be used by the developing world to protect its subsistence farmers in case a surge in agri-imports occurred. The key difference was the degree of increase in imports required to justify raising import duties by the developing world. There were also issues related to farm subsidies by the US and European Union which were leaving the farmers from developing countries less competitive. Both India and the US have expressed optimism that these issues would be satisfactorily resolved in the current meet.