COMMENTARY The WTO in Hong Kong: What it Really Means for the Doha Development Agenda RORDEN WILKINSON In mid December 2005 the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) primary decision- making body – the ministerial conference – met for only the sixth time since the Organization’s creation just a decade earlier. The venue for this biennial meeting was Hong Kong, and the task at hand was to inject energy into an increasingly delayed and periodically fractious round of trade negotiations – the so-called Doha Development Agenda (DDA). The Hong Kong meeting was to be the first time trade ministers had gathered for a full conference since the collapse of the Cancu ´n meeting a little over two years earlier; indeed, prior to the ministerial two out of the WTO’s first five ministerial conferences had broken down and, in the current round, only the conference launching the DDA (in Doha in Novem- ber 2001) had ended successfully. Given this backdrop, it was understandable that many approached the Hong Kong meeting with some trepidation. Few relished a repeat of the heightened political contestation that caused the breakdown of the meetings in Seattle in 1999 and Cancu ´n in 2003, or indeed the consequences that a collapse in Hong Kong might have for the DDA. For all of the speculation, the Hong Kong meeting failed to produce the break- down some had feared. 1 Instead, it resulted in an agreement to keep the round moving forward, albeit slowly. Though it is widely held that what was agreed in Hong Kong was modest, the fact that an agreement was forthcoming satisfied many. Moreover, it continued to build upon the climate of conciliation that had emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Cancu ´n meeting. 2 Indian Minister of Commerce and Industry Kamal Nath – one of the leading lights in, but neverthe- less critical voices of, the current round – saw fit to comment that the agreement ‘addresses our core concerns and interests and provides us enough negotiating space for future work’. 3 His close ally, Celso Amorim, Brazilian Minister of New Political Economy, Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2006 Rorden Wilkinson, Centre for International Politics, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. ISSN 1356-3467 print; ISSN 1469-9923 online=06=020291-13 # 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080=13563460600655672