Peter Gallagher looks at the latest WTO agriculture text and finds that it comes up short in many ways. I enjoyed his closing part:
The zombie vampire award in this catalog of half-way-measures goes to the “Commodities” section of the text. Here we find a proposal that the WTO’s Aid For Trade initiative should encourage funding for ‘commodity agreements’—including producer-only commodity agreements—designed to “stabilize prices”. Good grief! Is there any reason to think that such proposals are now more feasible in globalized markets than they were in the quasi-cartelized commodity trades of the 1970s? Is there no-one in Geneva who remembers that ‘stabilization’ plans for coffee, cocoa, rubber, tin, iron ore etc. were all expensive (and frequently corrupt) attempts to fix markets that ended in complete failure?
More at the link.
