An update on negotiations of WTO´s Doha Development Round: Another missed chance or business as usual? May 2006 The Doha Development Round(DDR) of the World Trade Organization(WTO) suffered another blow last week, when members had to acknowl­edge that they would fail to meet a key deadline of negotiations on 30 April. According to the Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration, WTO mem­bers were to establish modalities in the agriculture and non-agricultural market access(NAMA) nego­tiations, which are critical areas for a successful completion of the DDR, by this date. WTO Direc­tor-General, Pascal Lamy, had announced in a much noted statement in March that missing this deadline would be a“huge collective mistake”. On 24 April, he told journalists that“we may have missed the deadline but we are not in deadlock”. Unless the modalities in agriculture and NAMA are cleared by July, it will be impossible to agree on final terms by June 2007, when the US Presi­dent’s trade negotiations mandate(“Trade Pro­motion Authority”) expires. Why are the DDR negotiations so difficult? The Doha Development Round: Dealing with a global membership In 2001, the DDR was launched with the ambi­tious goal of serving especially the interests of developing countries. China celebrated its acces­sion to WTO in Doha, and thereby joined the group of fast-growing developing countries in this organization that have become major players in the world economy. They bring their own offen­sive and defensive strategies and make negotia­tions more complex and difficult than before. This became clear at the Fifth WTO Ministerial Confer­ence in Cancun, which basically failed due to the confrontation between developed and developing countries. At the Sixth WTO Ministerial Confer­ence in Hong Kong, members advanced slightly by fixing a timetable for negotiations with detailed deadlines. The negotiations´ progress: Changing gear and methods Lamy reiterated in his speeches that three areas hold the key to the rest of the negotiations and called them the“triangle issues”, i.e. agricultural domestic support, agricultural market access and NAMA. However, the chairs of the corresponding negotiation groups made clear that an agreement on modalities was still out of reach. Thus, a high­level meeting(“Mini-Ministerial”), envisaged for the end of April in Geneva, was postponed. Agricultural Domestic Support and Agricultural Market Access: Who moves first? The four core areas in agricultural negotiations are the formula for overall reductions in domestic support; the criteria for trade-distorting subsidies that are allowed if they require farmers to limit production( “ blue box ” ); the approach to tariff cuts; and the criteria and limits on sensitive prod­ucts. The Chairman of the Agriculture Negotiation Group, Ambassador Crawford Falconer of New Zealand, stated on 21 April that“we have not achieved full modalities … clear and simple”. The basic difficulty is that the EU did not top up its existing offer on cutting agricultural tariffs and the US did not offer further reductions in agricultural domestic support. Falconer proposed six weeks of continuous negotiations to move towards consen­sus without any formal deadlines and on the basis of reference papers. He had already circulated such papers for the other issues, where agree­ment was closer, i.e. new criteria for subsidies that