Just before Christmas the Doha Development Round was all but declared as dead. Unlike the recent climate change talks in Paris, or even the late September global agreement on Sustainable Development Goals at the UN, despite its equal importance, the outcome at the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Tenth Ministerial meeting in Nairobi, was scarcely mentioned in the Caribbean media.
This is unfortunate as the conference marked the moment when the developed and the developing world formally parted company over the Doha development agenda with the implication that the shape of world trade may change significantly to the detriment of future opportunity for the region’s exporters of goods and services.
By way of background, in Doha in November 2001, all WTO member states agreed to negotiate new world trade rules in a manner that would see in a single agreement, tariffs and other trade barriers reduced in
