The fifth WTO ministerial conference met in Cancún, Mexico, from 10 to 14 September 2003. It was supposed to take stock of the Doha Development Round launched two years earlier and to agree the framework for its final deals. Instead it collapsed on the last day without a declaration, the second failed ministerial after Seattle in 1999.
Why it failed
Two issues broke the meeting. The first was agriculture: the United States and the European Union tabled a joint text that offered little on the farm subsidies that developing countries said were destroying their markets, and four West African cotton producers got no answer to their demand to end cotton subsidies. The second was the “Singapore issues”, four topics (investment, competition policy, government procurement and trade facilitation) that the EU, Japan and South Korea wanted to add to the round and that most developing countries refused. When the chair insisted on the Singapore issues, the African, Caribbean and Pacific group walked out.
The G20 of the South
Cancún produced a new negotiating bloc: the G20 of developing countries led by Brazil, India, China and South Africa, formed in August 2003 to counter the US-EU agriculture text. It should not be confused with the G20 of finance ministers and heads of state. Its emergence signalled that the WTO could no longer conclude deals negotiated among the old “Quad” of the US, EU, Japan and Canada. Non-governmental organisations and parliamentarians’ networks that attended Cancún reported the collapse as a victory for the South; trade ministers called it a failure for everyone.
After Cancún
In July 2004 members agreed a framework that dropped three of the four Singapore issues, keeping only trade facilitation. The Hong Kong ministerial of 2005 set 2013 as the end date for agricultural export subsidies. But the round as a whole was never concluded: talks broke down in July 2008 over a safeguard for farmers, and by 2015, at the Nairobi ministerial, members openly disagreed on whether to continue the Doha mandate at all. The Trade Facilitation Agreement of 2013, which entered into force in 2017, is the only substantial multilateral result. Since then the WTO has struggled with a blocked Appellate Body and a shift of trade policy to regional agreements and, more recently, to tariffs and industrial policy.
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