Agricultural Liberalization in the Doha Round

Agriculture is an urgent and vital problem for developing countries, and even more so for the poorest countries that are often dependent on a very small set of commodities, many of which are highly subsidized and protected in the OECD countries. The Uruguay Round brought agriculture into the WTO legal framework, but did not lower the effective level of OECD farm protection after 1995 and granted many exceptions to WTO rules that reinforced agricultural protection. While there are a number of diverging forces that are potential sources of change in the levels and patterns of agricultural protection, the recent farm policies adopted by the U.S. and EU reflect an absence of significant domestic reform and appear to be going in the wrong direction (...).