WTO HONG KONG SUMMIT WEST AFRICA COTTON DEBATES – DOHA DEVELOPMENT ROUND

BY KEITH NUTHALL TRADE ministers at the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) Hong Kong summit are struggling today to reach a compromise deal on the vexed question of cotton subsidies that will prevent west African exporters scuppering an overall agreement. The United States has been under pressure to abandon its production payments to American growers, which are highly politically sensitive in the US. As a result, US Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Portman has been offering the west Africans a development package to improve their cotton industry competitiveness, ...


Full access to this article can be arranged with permission from the client that first ordered it. Please contact us to request access. Entries are uploaded to our archive at least one year after being published by a client – free access is restricted to International News Services journalists for background research only. The article date indicates when copy was filed to a client, not when posted to this archive. Upon client requests, International News Services will remove such articles from the archive or not upload them in the first place. They are included to demonstrate the breadth of topics undertaken by the agency and also to help promote clients’ coverage.