The Doha Round, launched in 2001 to lower so-called trade barriers such as tariffs worldwide and to strengthen and clarify the powers of the World Trade Organization (WTO), has dragged on allegedly because of disagreements — between the United States and the EU and between the developing nations and the dominant economic powers — over agricultural policies and levels of permissible tariffs. The United States, long wedded to its oldest major domestic socialist program, agricultural subsidies, finds itself under fire inasmuch as such subsidies supposedly give U.S. agricultural producers an unfair advantage over their less heavily-subsidized international competitors.
The Doha Round, like its predecessor, the Uruguay Round that gave rise to the WTO, is being promoted as a “free trade” project, when in fact it is nothing more than an exercise in internationally managed trade — socialism on a global scale, in other words. The WTO, instead of creating bona fide free international trade, merely substituted international regulatory authority for national controls on trade. Tariffs and other trade barriers were replaced with international mandates and the threat of coordinated international trade embargoes on nations that refused to comply.
The new Doha Round promises more of the same, meaning that the United States, like other potential parties to the new trade agreement, are being pressured to give up socialism on the national level — farm subsidies and whatnot — in favor of a socialist global trade regime. “The key point,” said Dan Price, the former Bush Administration’s key man on the Doha Round, “is that all countries [in the Doha Round] are going to have to make uncomfortable choices between now and next year.”
We couldn’t have said it better.
