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The Doha Round of multilateral negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been hamstrung by deep differences between WTO member states over the direction of trade reform in the agricultural and manufactured goods sectors. The latest attempt to break this deadlock is the release on 6 December 2008 of revised draft modalities texts for agriculture and non-agricultural market access (NAMA, which is concerned with industrial trade) by the chairpersons of the negotiations in these areas.

This paper examines the provisions of the two texts and finds that they retain many of the imbalances from previous drafts and proposals which could not gain consensus among the WTO membership. Both the agriculture and NAMA texts cater to the sensitivities of developed countries, which would see little, if any, substantial reduction in their applied tariffs and subsidies. In contrast, many developing countries would have to undertake drastic tariff cuts without much flexibility to safeguard their policy space for future development strategies.

MARTIN KHOR is Director of the Third World Network. An economist trained in Cambridge University, he is the author of several books and articles on trade, development and environment issues.