The Doha Agricultural Market Access Negotiations: Remaining Conceptual, Practical, and Technical Issues

Before the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations can be concluded negotiators will need to agree on a host of market access issues, including the size of tariff cuts, a methodology for opening tariff quotas in the case of products exempted from applying full tariff cuts, and the amount of flexibility to be provided under special and differential treatment for developing countries. Each of these issues harbours a number of complex problems that will have to be addressed. How these are resolved could have significant impacts on the actual level of market access created by the final agreement. This paper analyses the extensive inventory of outstanding issues yet to be resolved if an effective outcome is to be reached