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going out on the defensive, the Commissioner for Trade, Pascal Lamy, instead wanted the EU to take the initiative (Swinnen 2008, 144). It is therefore no coincidence that the Fischler Reforms were finally agreed on just before the ill-fated WTO Ministerial meeting in Cancun. There were high expectations of the Cancun meeting, which was thought to be an important step on the road to a final agreement that would conclude the Doha Round before the official deadline of December 2004. Or, as agricultural ministers themselves put it in the Council’s brief upon adopting the Reform package: This reform is […] a message to our trading partners […] It signifies a major departure from trade-distorting agricultural support, a progressive further reduction of export subsidies, a reasonable balance between domestic production and preferential market access, and a new balance between internal production and market opening. […] The CAP reform is Europe's important contribution to the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), and constitutes the limits for the Commission's negotiating brief in the WTO Round. Its substance and timing are aimed at avoiding that reform will be designed and imposed in Cancun and/or Geneva -which could happen if we went there empty handed. (Council of the European Union 2003, 3) Public posturing, however, does not necessarily explain the the true motives of the Community- level decision makers. After all, it is known from previous reforms that there is “incoherence between, on the one hand, the factors that were officially invoked to justify the reforms and, on the other hand, those that really seem to have motivated them” (Cunha and Swinbank, 260). However, it is true that domestic budgetary pressures were not as significant as they had been during previous reforms, and that though there were alternative methods available for dealing with new member states, some of them would have caused much frustration among the EU’s trading partners. Furthermore, there is empirical evidence that the EU sincerely attempted to take a leadership role in the Doha Development Agenda. For example, in the spring of 2004, after the MTR was already being implemented, the Commission made an attempt to relaunch 43