In the late 1990s, as members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) began preparing themselves for the next round of multilateral trade negotiations, the Australian Government commissioned a study on The Impact of Agricultural Trade Liberalisation on Developing Countries (Freeman et al. 2000). Its purpose was to provide a better understanding of the specific concerns of developing countries in the farm trade policy space. Since then, following the launch of the WTO's so-called Doha Development Agenda (DDA) in late 2001, some developing country members have sought to keep certain agricultural trade matters high on the negotiating agenda. They have not been able to reach a consensus with other WTO members on several of those matters, however. Certainly some progress was made at the biennial Trade Ministerial Meetings in Bali in late 2013 and Nairobi in late 2015, but for many WTO members there is no longer an expectation that a comprehensive single undertaking will emerge from the DDA process.

The purpose of this study is to review how matters have developed in recent years and, in the light of that, to explore ways in which further consensus might be reached so as to progress multilateral or plurilateral farm trade policy reforms on Doha issues, and in ways that ensure welfare is improved in developing countries, especially for those food-insecure households still suffering from poverty, hunger and malnutrition.

The study was launched at a Cairns Group Farm Leaders’ Seminar at the WTO Secretariat in Geneva, 11 November 2016. The author is grateful to WTO Ambassadors and their staff for their helpful comments at that seminar. He also wishes to thank the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) for financial support, and Joe Glauber, who as part of this project prepared a short issues paper for DFAT in August 2016 entitled ‘Unfinished Business in Agricultural Trade Liberalisation’, on which Chapters Six and Seven build.