With the decade-long implementation of the Uruguay Round agreements to be completed at the end of 2004, including the historic URAA, and the WTO's membership expanded to cover all but a small fraction of world trade, it was expected that a new round of multilateral trade negotiations would be launched as early as the WTO's 1999 Trade Ministerial Meeting in Seattle. However, that meeting had to be abandoned because of anti-globalization protesters. It was only after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the United States that the membership of the WTO convened in the capital of Qatar to launch a new comprehensive round, the so-called Doha Development Agenda.

In the first few years of the DDA there was a great deal of ex ante analysis of the prospective effects of a DDA agreement. The quality of that analysis was far higher and far more comprehensive than prior to any of the GATT's seven negotiation rounds that preceded it, including the Uruguay Round. Given the focus on development, many analyses gave special attention to the likely effects on developing countries in particular. And because market distortions were still greatest in agriculture, that sector got more attention than any other.

It now seems unlikely that all the policy reform proposals tabled in the first few years of the DDA will ever become part of a single-undertaking agreement at the WTO. Nonetheless, analyses of them are worth examining because they give insights into what might have been, and why the package was insufficiently appealing to enough of the key members of the WTO. They also offer cautions as to what to avoid in future. So after providing some background, this chapter summarizes the main questions that were addressed in the economic analyses that focused on the agricultural parts of the DDA, and explains what was learnt from a sample of those analyses.

Background to the DDA

Agriculture has a habit of causing contention in international trade negotiations. It caused long delays to the Uruguay Round in the late 1980s and 1990s, and again it proved to be the major stumbling block in the DDA.