-Livemint.com It has repeatedly failed to protect the domestic food security agenda The cabinet’s approval of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) on Wednesday is, on the face of it, a relatively innocuous development. As WTO deals go, this is low-hanging fruit. The agreement is to reduce administrative barriers at ports and customs, reducing transactional costs of international trade and consequently—according to various studies—increasing global gross domestic product...

-Economic and Political Weekly Biswajit Dhar (bisjit@gmail.com) teaches at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Roshan Kishore (roshan.jnu@gmail.com) is currently a data journalist with Mint. With the formation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, the United States farm subsidies had moved towards income support, reducing spending on price support measures. The explicit reason was that the WTO had held that the latter forms were more...

-The Hindu Business Line The mythology of free trade being a force for economic progress remains entrenched in world politics Globalisation has created a unique spectator sport, where political dignitaries periodically gather at carefully chosen venues for days of deliberation over humanity’s most consequential problems. It is a spectacle at which ‘civil society’ — as the new force in world politics is called — is granted a tent of its own, financed...

-The Hindu In the pipeline are visits by Mr.Modi to African countries starting with Kenya likely next month Starting with a proposed visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Africa in February, India plans to play a leadership role at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations to boost the trade prospects of the developing and poor nations. To forge strong alliances on the “development agenda” of the WTO’s ongoing Doha Round of...

-Economic and Political Weekly India plays a poor hand at the World Trade Organization's negotiations. The idea that there is no longer a sharp divide between the global North and the global South has been disproved in ample measure by the decisions taken last month in Nairobi at the 10th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The essence of the final communique is that the 14-year-old Doha “Development” Agenda (DDA)...