A Positive Failure: The end of the WTO Doha Round talks

The Doha Round talks sprung from the early post-9/11 global sympathy for the US. Early on, George W. Bush promoted the Doha Round talks as another front in the War on Terror. In his 2002 State of the Union address, he closed with the words, “In every region, free markets and free trade and free societies are proving their power to lift lives. Together with friends and allies from Europe to Asia and Africa to Latin America, we will demonstrate that the forces of terror cannot stop the momentum of freedom.”

Even with all of the rhetoric “W” used to fertilize the ground of his trade policy, he was met with resistance at the Cancun ministerial in 2002 from the G20—a group of developing nations fashioning their name from the G8—who saw corporate globalization not so much as the momentum of freedom, but as rather, exploitation.

Since the resistance toward the corporatist global agenda in Cancun, where Korean farmer, Lee Kyung Hae, took his life in response to neoliberal policy, little progress had been made in either direction. The G20 and the Global South pressured the US and Europe to cut its agricultural subsidies that created artificially low prices for basic agricultural commodities that flood the world’s markets, forcing farmers in the Global South to sell their goods below costs of production.

The US would not budge without major concessions from the developing world. US Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, demanded that US corporations be given 1 dollar of market access for each dollar it reduces in its subsides.

This was the stalemate that could not be overcome. The European countries were willing to compromise by reducing agricultural subsidies and tariffs without demanding significant concessions in market access, and quickly pointed their fingers at the US for the failure of the Doha round.