The "Kicking Away the Ladder" Syndrome and Developing Countries in the Doha Round

When one attempts  to understand the philosophy of Developing Countries in the Doha Round, there is a much neglected idea that developing Countries negotiators do not like to express explicitly in broad daylight. It is however a powerful force behind their positions.

This idea is that the Doha Round must be a "development round" , as they understand this expression,  in order to compensate developing countries for the fact that rich countries and especially the US were in the past the greatest beneficiaries of the previous rounds. This idea appears clearly in the following passage by China's WTO ambassador Sun Zhenyu:

China urges the U.S.,

to play a leading role and make a new and meaningful offer to substantially reduce its domestic support in agriculture to break the ice...

This idea is in fact a variant of a more general idea which has a profound influence on many developing countries negotiators and which could be called the "Kicking Away the Ladder" syndrome. According to this idea, rich nations of today have become rich by adopting a range of protectionist and interventionist policies but are now "kicking away" the ladder they had used to climb up, by trying to prevent developing nations from using today the same policies.

This is one of the most powerful reasons of why many developing countries have understood the "development round" notion as in fact another way of saying a "compensation round".