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Doha Round Postponed

Published 12/30/08 Dustin Ensinger - Print Article
E-mail - editor@economyincisis.org

Pascal Lamy, chief of the undemocratic and clandestine World Trade Organization, has announced that ministerial talks for the Doha Development Round of trade talks have been called off for the remainder of the year. Lamy was hoping to convene a December meeting, however, the talks were abandoned because there was not enough consensus among major economies, he said.

While the announcement is a blow to the WTO and advocates of trade liberalization around the world, it is a major victory for blue-collar American workers that have suffered from bad trade agreements for years now.

This latest round of trade talks, which began in November 2007, have been at an impasse over certain trade barriers and agricultural subsidies. Developing economies such as Brazil, India and China are at odds with the more developed economies of the U.S., the European Union and Japan over subsidies provided to the agricultural industry in those developed nations. The underdeveloped economies claim that those subsidies make their agricultural exports uncompetitive on the world stage.

Trade liberalization may have reached its high water mark in the past decade. For the first time in over a quarter Century, global trade will shrink next year, according to USA Today. As of 2006, global trade was increasing at a rate of nearly six percent annually.

In addition, it appears that a trio of bi-lateral trade deals between the U.S. and Columbia, Panama and South Korea seem to have been permanently stalled.

"As time goes on and the jobless rate goes up everywhere, we will see a growing trend toward protectionism," says Sung Won Sohn, an economist at California State University.

Hopefully this encouraging trend will only continue, even as economies around the world begin to improve. The WTO and “free trade” agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Central American Free Trade Agreement and others have decimated the American economy by destroying its manufacturing base. A step back from disastrous “free trade” agreements is exactly what the American economy needs if it is ever to regain its place as the world's most robust and efficient country.

Source Daily Monitor:

World Trade Organization (WTO) chief Pascal Lamy has abandoned attempts to restart the world trade talks. Mr Lamy has told ambassadors that he has decided there was not enough consensus among major economies to call new ministerial talks on a trade deal.

The news came after the WTO held intensive consultations with US, India, China, Brazil and the European Union. The WTO was hoping to convene a meeting in December to try and revive the stalled Doha trade round. It had been urged to do so by the G20 summit of world leaders in November, who called for urgent trade talks by the end of the year.

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