Introduction

In December 2005, after four years of difficult and tedious negotiations, the WTO's Sixth Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong decided upon a bare minimum: the negotiations should continue and be concluded by the end of 2006. The ministers avoided complete failure at the conference, but could not make significant progress on the three main negotiating items, namely agriculture, industrial tariffs and services. This chapter will discuss the positions of the European chemical industry on the WTO DDA negotiations and on specific trade policy issues related to these negotiations. It seriously questions whether the Doha Development Agenda can produce meaningful liberalisation results for a global industry, such as the chemical industry.

Governments and the press have criticised business for not being active and outspoken enough on the DDA negotiations. It is true that given the narrow mandate of the DDA negotiations the business community is not as active with respect to the DDA as it was with respect to the Uruguay Round. Yet European, Japanese and American business organisations have all adopted strong positions on the negotiations and have made them public. Substantive business positions do exist – the real problem, however, lies in whether governments and the press are interested in these positions.