1THE ECONOMICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

Late in the evening of July 31, 2004, trade negotiators announced the completion of a framework agreement in the Doha Work Program, the Doha agenda for WTO negotiations. This agreement does not represent the completion of the Doha Round of trade negotiations, but simply an agreement in principle for moving forward with negotiations on specific commitments in the coming months (WTO). The reality is that the completion of the Doha Round is still months, and perhaps years away as the agreement even included text to explicitly move back the original Doha completion target of January 2005. That being said, the agreement does represent a major step towards a new trade agreement that at times over the past few years seemed doubtful. In fact, the current WTO negotiating agenda is called the Doha agenda because the first trade ministerial meeting focused on this round of talks failed so miserably in Seattle in 1999 that there was not even an agenda to move forward with from the talks. It was until the second ministerial round in Doha in 2001 that an agenda for further negotiation emerged. But then, the third major ministerial round in Cancun in 2003 also failed to provide any substantial progress towards consensus. Only continued high-level discussions between major trading partners and various coalitions of countries over the past few months provided the impetus for the recent late night agreement. The agreement covers several categories, including “modalities ” or methods of reform for agricultural trade