If the Doha Round proceeds in the same way as its predecessor, informing the negotiating process with research results will not be easy.
The Uruguay Round made erratic progress. A Draft Final Act had been produced by the end of 1991, but the agricultural proposals were rejected by the European Union (EU) (Croome 1995: 328). There followed two years in which most of the “action” took place in bilateral talks between the EU and the United States (USA) from which other states were largely excluded. Even when the formal negotiations were re-launched in July 1993, there were at least three tracks: the discussion in the formal General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) groups; the personal “facilitating” of the new GATT Director General, Peter Sutherland, who ‘kept up a punishing series of whirlwind visits to top-level political leaders in the major countries’ (Croome 1995: 349), and bilateral negotiations between the EU and USA, with their respective chief negotiators, Sir Leon Brittan and Mickey Kantor, having from November ‘a crucial series of meetings … that were to continue with only short breaks over a period of more than three weeks’ (Croome 1995: 364).
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This article comes from the IDS Bulletin 34.2 (2003) An Analytical Framework for Further Research
