Unravelling the Doha round

Change low graphic options | Change language | Skip content to navigation

Page context: Home > Transport International Magazine > Issue 22 January 2006 > When will trade deliver? > Unravelling the Doha round

By Brendan Martin

By the time you read this, the sixth ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) will have concluded in Hong Kong amid claims of success, failure, triumph or disaster, depending on point of view.

The WTO came into being in 1995, taking over from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was founded half a century earlier. It has 148 members and engineers increasing liberalisation of trade in both goods and services. It also makes and enforces trade rules.

Since 2001, the WTO has been attempting to conclude the so-called Doha Round of negotiations, also known as the “development round” because it is supposed to promote economic and social development through trade.

There is a range of issues on the agenda, and they are discussed through a complex set of councils, meetings and other bodies between ministerial meetings, which take place every two years.

The WTO’s hopes for the Hong Kong conference were to make sufficient progress with tariff reductions in both agricultural and non-agricultural goods, and with liberalisation of services, to enable the Doha Round to be completed by the end of this year.

However, it was originally supposed to be concluded at the fifth ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico, in 2003. That meeting broke up without agreement, although also without the street protests and violence that first put the WTO on newspaper front pages when the third ministerial conference collapsed in Seattle in 1999.

The global union movement, including the ITF, lobbied hard in the run-up to the December conference and in Hong Kong for a set of demands to fight poverty, protect public services and promote labour standards. It also continues to campaign for more transparency and democracy in WTO decision making.

For the ITF this happens independently and through the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, as well as through the broader alliance with hundreds of other social organisations linked through the Global Call for Action against Poverty.

The next edition of TI will include an analysis of the outcome of the Hong Kong conference and its significance for transport workers and their unions.

Section home:
Issue 22 January 2006

Other pages for When will trade deliver?:

Full graphics version

accessibility | site help | site map

The journal of the International Transport Workers' Federation

ITF House, 49-60 Borough Road, London SE1 1DR | +44 20 7403 2733 | mail@itf.org.uk