Doha Development Round of 2001

The Doha Development Round of 2001 was a forum created by the World Trade Organization (WTO)—the international institution responsible for overseeing the world trading system and policy—to negotiate and discuss issues related to global trade. It was named after the city in which the conference took place. Ministers from 144 WTO member countries gathered in Doha to reach consensus on how to integrate the world's poorest nations into the world economy in November of 2001.

Arranged by the WTO, the declaration of the Fourth Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar, was the eighth round of trade liberalization held since 1948. Following the Uruguay Round of 1986–1994, which created the WTO as the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Doha Round was held to bring to the forefront the needs and special interests of developing countries to the WTO's agenda. The Doha conference marked the start of a new series of multilateral trade talks scheduled to end in 2004.

The agenda set at Doha and discussed at successive meetings in Cancun in 2003 focused on dismantling trade barriers for developing nations to promote growth. Toward this end, the main issues centered on agricultural subsidies, liberalizing trade of manufactured goods and services, and intellectual property rights protection.

Related to agriculture, the declaration defined the objective of establishing a fair global market-oriented trading system that would allow market access to all developing nations. The intent was to reduce and eventually eliminate all forms of export subsidies for these countries and to significantly reduce any domestic trade support within nations. The discussion on the reduction of export subsidies also covered industrial goods. Tariff reduction and all nontariff barriers on clothing, textiles, and other nonagricultural products were also agreed by the ministers for the leastdeveloped countries. However, none of this was to be at the expense of the environment. The Ministerial Declaration included a commitment to environmental sustainable development in all member countries by defining, in part, the relationship between WTO trade rules and environmental agreements.

One of the more pressing issues negotiated at Doha involved trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS). The stated goal of the declaration was to allow access to existing medicines and to encourage the development of new pharmaceutical drugs to improve public health in developing nations. These countries lobbied for relaxed rules on pharmaceutical inventions from developed nations. Building on talks held at the Uruguay Round, Third World nations demanded greater access to essential medicine to deal with epidemics such as AIDS. This accessibility involved offering lowerpriced generic drugs to countries unable to solve public health crises. Demonstrating the grand importance placed on this issue, the ministers at Doha created a separate declaration on TRIPS. Member governments of the WTO are not to be prevented from taking measures to protect their country's right to public health under the TRIPS Agreement. The council set out to discover solutions for compulsory licensing of medicines and agreed to extend the deadline for underdeveloped nations to establish provisions on drug patents until January 2016.

The WTO expanded its membership at Doha to include China and the Taiwan Province of China. This accession reinforced the WTO's goal of facilitating the addition of other less-developed nations. Related to WTO membership, the Doha meeting emphasized the importance of transparency of operations and information and nondiscrimination of negotiated agreements for all members. Special provisions were established for developing countries to receive special and differential treatment to implement the agreements resulting from the round. The desired long-term implications of the discussions were to bring about the benefits of free trade and the opening of markets to developing countries. This has yet to be determined.

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