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The author is indebted to Amrita Narlikar and Rorden Wilkinson for the challenging comments and suggestions made on earlier versions of the paper that inspired the final draft. The original research for this paper was undertaken for a forthcoming book edited by Amrita Narlikar and Brendan Vickers.
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1.
Introduction
The WTO Doha Round negotiations were launched in November 2001, in Doha, Qatar in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US. The event was a significant success for the newly formed WTO after the dramatic failure of the Seattle Ministerial Conference held in December 1999 to launch the new round. However, this initial success was to be marred by several subsequent failed ministerial 1 meetings and missed deadlines. The Doha mandate called for modalities2 in agriculture to be agreed by March 2002, and in NAMA (non-agricultural market access or industrial tariffs) by the end of May 2002. By December 2008, the establishment of full modalities, in the agriculture and the NAMA negotiations, was still to be achieved by the WTO.
The attempt by WTO members to secure a 'framework agreement' by the time of the Cancun Ministerial Conference, in September 2003, was frustrated by the collapse of the Cancun meeting. The limited objective of WTO members to at least agree on a 'framework' for modalities was finally achieved in the July 2004 Framework Agreement. Building on this success and learning from the Cancun collapse, the WTO reduced its expectation to achieve full modalities at the next WTO Ministerial Conference held in Hong Kong, China, and merely made some incremental advances on the July 2004 Framework Agreement. However, since then the various attempts to achieve...