By Biswajit Dhar | Briefing Paper # 49 | January 10, 2022
After they forced the government to repeal the three controversial farm laws, and thus to ensure the continuation of the minimum price support mechanism, India’s farmers face yet another challenge, this time from World Trade Organization (WTO). On 14th December, a WTO dispute settlement panel concluded in its report that India was violating its commitments under the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) by granting price support to sugarcane producers and export subsidies to sugar during the period 2014/15 to 2018/19.
By Ranja Sengupta | Briefing Paper # 48 | November 23, 2021
In a historic move, the UN Sustainable Development Goal 14.6 mandated the World Trade Organization (WTO) to “prohibit certain forms of fisheries subsidies which contribute to overcapacity and overfishing, and eliminate subsidies that contribute to IUU fishing …, recognizing that appropriate and effective special and differential treatment for developing and least developed countries should be an integral part of the WTO fisheries subsidies negotiation”.
The developed countries used this mandate to launch active negotiations on disciplining…
By Biswajit Dhar | Briefing Paper # 47 | November 16, 2021
The 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) of the World Trade Organization is being convened in Geneva at the end of this month, a year and a half after it was scheduled to be held in Kazakhstan. MC12 is being held at an important juncture when the global trade scenario is quite upbeat. Recent WTO estimates show that global trade volumes could expand by 11 percent in 2021, and by over 4 percent in 2022, and could stabilise at a level…
More than 100 civil society organisations, including Madhyam, have sought a major overhaul of the World Bank’s governing structures and policies following the scandal that led to the scrapping of its flagship publication, the ‘Doing Business’ report. This report ranks 190 countries on the Ease of Doing Business index. Following is the full text of the statement issued by CSOs on October 12, 2021:
In September, the World Bank announced that it would discontinue the publication of the Doing Business…
By Kavaljit Singh | Briefing Paper # 46 | September 24, 2021
On September 22, the US Federal Reserve signaled plans to start reducing its large-scale asset purchases – a process known as tapering – this year and hinted at raising interest rates as early as next year. The formal announcement on tapering could come at the next meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) scheduled in early November if no major risks materialize and the Fed achieves its maximum employment and price stability goals. “If progress continues broadly as expected,…
