The Hong Kong Ministerial Meet

Paper Summary:

This paper analyzes the extent to which the promises made at the WTO Ministerial at Hong Kong by rich countries, especially the European Union and the United States, can be fulfilled within the time frame stated i.e. 2013. It examines the prospects of how soon the international trade in agriculture can start taking place on a fair and level playing field for all countries. The paper questions whether the production processes are competitive in these countries and explores how the political economy of each country plays a role in the issue of governmental support.

From the Paper:

"Agriculture has evolved as one of the major issues in the WTO negotiations, which is much more complicated than any other issues at hand. For the coming WTO Ministerial Meet in December 2005, it was the turn to agree on formulas and other details that will determine the scale of reductions in tariffs on thousands of products and farm subsidies. Here we will confine our discussion only on the agricultural sector. Many have seen the Hong Kong Meet as a lost opportunity for the developing nations to make trade fairer for poor people around the world. Rich countries put their commercial interests before those of the developing countries and most of the difficult decisions were postponed for a further meeting early in the year 2006. This has been the trend in the previous rounds of negotiations also. The Oxfam International Briefing Paper number 85 'correctly' observes that it was far from clear why rich countries that were unable to show the necessary leadership in Hong Kong will behave any differently in a few months' time. In fact, it would have been unwise to expect them to behave differently even at Hong Kong. Since July 2004, nothing remarkable has changed. As always has been the case, this time too, the focus was on the US and the EU policies, which only matter because policies in these two large markets have the most impact on the global market prices of agricultural commodities. A glance at the last 50 years of history of agriculture in the US and the EU, will reveal that the agricultural subsidies in the US & EU have been a persistent phenomenon. At different times the policymakers have accorded different justifications for continuing the same. Nevertheless, all the different political economic theories share a common denominator that the principal goal of subsidies is 'to support farm income while minimizing budget costs'."

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