Failture of the anti-development Doha Round!! Victory to the peoples!!!

Civil society organizations from Brazil and from around the world are celebrating the collapse of negotiations towards the conclusion of the Doha Round of the WTO. Since the WTO was created at the peak of neoliberalism in the 1990s, these organizations have come to question the validity of the basic premises of the institution and to denounce the grave consequences that the closure of this Round would bring to peoples of diverse parts of the world.

These consequences principally concern the liberalization of trade in industrial goods and services for certain countries of the South in exchange for the opening of markets in the North to agricultural exports. This would signify the crystallization of a model in which developing countries would continue in the role as exporters of agricultural commodities, and developed countries as furnishers of technology and goods and services of greater aggregated value. It would also mean the deepening of the trade and financial opening proposed by the neoliberal model. And ultimately, it would represent a blow to the rights of the peoples and to the sovereignty of countries with respect to their capacity to formulate their own public and industrial policies.

During the last week, a very small number of WTO members, the so-called G-6 ? formed by the United States, European Union, Brazil , India, Australia and Japan ? met in Geneva to try to unlock negotiations of the Doha Round one more time. The attempt to settle points around agricultural negotiations (in particular, about internal support) met with no success, and there is no provision for the talks to be resumed.

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