Question

IPE: Did the focus on sustainable development cause the failure of the Doha Round? Word Limit: 1000

Answer 1

The Doha round was launched in November 2001 at Doha Qatar. It was mainly focused towards economic growth of the developing countries through increase in export of food items to developing country by the developed countries ,through reducing the government spending on subsidies in developed countries , environmental issues , decreasing trade barriers around the world committing all countries to negotiations opening agricultural and manufacturing markets ,opening trade in services negotiations and expanding intellectual property rights, making trade rules better for developing countries, agricultural concessions etc . In the Doha ministerial declaration , the trade and environment development committee acted as forums for identifying environmental aspects of the trade agreements , however disagreements due to economic concerns of the country were the prime focus and very less focus was given to the sustainable development issues in the world .Mainly the developing countries focused on the sustainable development, however the Doha round was unable to fulfill any economic as well as social expectation of both the developing and the developed economies .As all the WTO members participated the decisions that had to be taken were to be taken through agreement between all the countries .In addition to this, there was absence of sub agreements which meant that either the entire agreement had to be accepted or the entire agreement had to be rejected, part performance was not allowed .This was the biggest reason that the negotiation could not be reached between the countries as there were major disagreements between the countries .Secondly the countries failed to make agricultural concessions they were required to make .Thirdly Doha round was mainly focused on increasing the scope of existing WTO regime. The gains projected by the WTO would have created good amount of profit for agribusiness and manufacturing industries however small farmers and larger chunk of population would have seen a very less amount of profit or even have faced losses .Another major reason was political pressures from big Giants in the United States and the European Union which were more in favour of the bilateral trade agreement instead of multilateral trade agreement.Thus we can conclude that Doha round included the the issue of sustainable development while mainly focusing on economic development of the countries, however its failure was not based on major focus on sustainable development instead disagreements between the countries ,more focus on bilateral agreements between countries and inability of the country to provide agricultural concessions were the major reasons for the failure of Doha round.