Demystifying Doha: Making Sense of the WTO Agricultural Trade Talks

Jennifer Clapp is a CIGI Chair in International Governance and Associate Professor, Environment and Resource Studies, at the University of Waterloo. She has written widely on the global political economy of agriculture and the environment. Her most recent book, co-authored with Peter Dauvergne, is Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment.

Agricultural trade negotiators spent June and July of this year, 2006, frantically trying to conclude negotiations on a major agreement to govern agricultural trade as part of the WTO Doha "Development" Round of trade talks. Despite their efforts, the talks collapsed in late July …