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Thread: Do you think Doha talks will be successful this time?

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[quote=GUEST7273,311400]In so far as fat subsidies for rich US (and European) farmers are unconscionable, they have a point. The US Congress has just passed a law pouring even more money into agriculture. The Bush administration's demand for market access in developing countries as the price for cutting its own farm support demonstrates an absence both of economic logic and good faith.

As Mr Mandelson has pointed out many times, the industrialised world cannot talk seriously about a commitment to development as long as it locks poor farmers out of global food markets. But the breakdown was more complicated. The developing world scarcely speaks as one. India and China are as concerned to protect their markets from poorer nations as to keep out US multinationals. Brazil, another of the so-called Brics, was among the small group wanting a deal. Uruguay sided with Washington in demanding China and India open markets. The losers from the impasse will not be the prosperous, but some of the poorest.

So it will be tempting for the big players to shrug their shoulders. The direct costs of failure – a successful Doha round might have added another $100bn, or one tenth of one per cent, to the world economy – look small in the scheme of things. Many existing tariffs are already below the maximums in the proposed agreement.

This sanguine analysis misses a more important point.

For the past few decades the opening of markets and growing economic interdependence have been a force for geopolitical stability as well as of rising economic welfare for the world's poorest. We learned at the beginning of the 20th century that globalisation offers no guarantee against war. But mutual economic dependence does provide a powerful incentive to settle political differences.

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