Stuck in Doha Round quicksand, trade ministers participating in the WTO Ministerial in Geneva left town today with nothing much accomplished. Well, actually, some left a day early—demonstrating once again how deadening these negotiations have become.
As IATP's Anne Laure Constantin said in our press release today, “With 1 billion people going hungry every day, governments must build a more coherent system of global governance for food and agriculture. The WTO needs to rejoin the wider multilateral system and defer to other institutions with the mandate to advance human rights and sustainable development, rather than reducing them to an afterthought in the trade debate. World leaders should take a fresh look at the Marrakesh Agreement, which established the WTO. It sets overarching objectives to raise standards of living, promote sustainable development and protect the environment. The obsession with tariffs and subsidies, at the expense of public policy goals, needs to end.”
