While attention is focused on this week's meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Pusan, South Korea, the main event is the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting to be held next month in Hong Kong. That ministerial meeting is critical to the success of the current round of global trade negotiations. Unfortunately, the talks have stalemated, and the culprit appears to be the European Union -- France in particular. A breakdown would be a dangerous setback to the prospects of many of the world's poorest citizens. Resistance to agriculture market liberalization must be overcome.
The Doha Round of trade negotiations, launched four years ago, was premised on the agreement that it would focus on opportunities for developing economies. That meant, for all practical purposes, increasing access to agriculture markets in the world's richest countries. A recent World Bank study estimated that trade liberalization would add nearly $300 billion annually to the global economy by 2015, with two-thirds of those gains coming from reducing barriers to trade in agriculture.
Progress in this area has been slow; while industrialized nations have pushed relentlessly for increased access for their goods and services in developing country markets, they have been reluctant to extend similar opportunities to farm goods from the developing world, products that are often those countries' most valuable exports. The reason, as Japanese well know, is that agricultural lobbies are often extremely powerful in national capitals. Politicians liberalize at their peril.