The Doha Development Round or Doha Development Agenda (DDA) is latest round of trade negotiations among the World Trade Organization (WTO) which initiated in November 2001 under then executive general Mike Moore. It is the Fourth Ministerial Conference with the goal to bring down exchange hindrances around the globe, and along these lines encourage expanded worldwide exchange.
The Doha Ministerial Declaration provided the mandate for the negotiations including on agriculture, services and an intellectual property topic which began earlier.
The ministers passed two declarations:
• The first, the main declaration folded the ongoing negotiations in agriculture and services into a broader agenda, which is commonly known as the …show more content…
(This is part of the free trade and liberalization ideas that they promote, which have been under increasing criticism from many angles in recent years.)
• Poorer countries wanted to finish older issues mostly on agriculture that affected them the most, especially the impact of European and U.S. subsidies on their own agriculture and lack of access to those markets. (This actually goes against the free trade ideas that these two regions especially promote.)
• This impasse led to the end of the talks for now but for the first time showed the developing countries make a successful and united stand to represent their concerns.
• First, differences over the Singapore issues seemed incapable of resolution. The EU had retreated on few of its demands, but several developing countries refused any consideration of these issues at …show more content…
Agriculture, ii. Non-agricultural market access, iii. Services, iv. Trade facilitation, respectively.
In addition, the agreement acknowledges the activities of other negotiating groups (such as those on rules, dispute settlement, and intellectual property) and exhorts them to fulfill their Doha round negotiating objectives. The agreement also abandoned the 1 January 2005 deadline for the negotiations and set December 2005 as the date for the 6th ministerial to be held in Hong Kong.
HONG KONG, 2005
The Sixth Ministerial Conference took place in Hong Kong on December 13-18, 2005.
The members of WTO adopted the Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration which set out a series of agreements in the major negotiating areas and a timetable for the next and final phase of the negotiations. The outcome of the conference laid a solid basis for the round to be completed by 2006.
However, the concerns from previous years remained, including the lack of transparency and democracy in the decision-making processes, and the power that the rich nations have over the poor to distort trade in their favor. The previous Ministerial meeting in 2003 collapsed when developing countries managed to stand up against unfair demands from rich nations. Yet, since then, the same issues have resurfaced as rich nations appear to have hardly moved on their countless promises, pledges and