“This hardline stance had American fingerprints all over it. Political realities in Congress (the chairman of the Senate agriculture committee is a close ally of the cotton farmers) made American negotiators fiercely defensive of their outrageous subsidies”.
http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2071855

The Indians are also running this version of things. Now while it is to soon to be clear, it does seem that the Europeans may have been ’set up’ on Singapore, and that the bigger problem may be elsewhere.

Whether this is because the US is moving generally away from multilateralism, whether it is simply a temporary blip caused by the imminence of the US electoral process, or whether there is some serious re-thinking of globalisation going on, we will only know when we get a bit further upstream.

Aidan - *sigh*, I spell International English - somewhat inconsistently - but I still speak ‘Mercan. I have developped a fondness for the word “bollocks” though, probably from watching the Beeb. I suspect that you’re right about the G21, but what I fear is that the US and EU no longer have any reason to go back to the WTO, especially since there is some much acrimony over WTO decisions on trade between just the two of them.

Ryan, one of the theories I’m entertaining is that raising these issues was done intentionally to kill talks on agriculture. The only problem is that Lamy’s willingness to unbundle agriculture from investment discussions doesn’t make sense under that theory.

Tobias, if the “small groups” means one, big industrialised country - e.g. Japan, the US or the EU - and a bunch of smaller or poorer countries, it’s more or less the same as a bilateral accord. One of the reasons for the WTO was to try to bring more balance and less neocolonialism to trade talks by putting all the big rich countries and all the small and poor countries together.

Markku, what exactly should those third world governments have done to respond to free trade? If you mean liberalise their markets, I can show you plenty of examples of states that did just that failed anyway. Same for infrastructure investment, legal reform and anti-corruption measures.

Magnus, according to my less-than-totally-trusty CIA factbook, Sweden does about 60% of its trade with the EU, and the engineering sector - which is dominated by very large firms with deep links to various governments - represents some 50% of GDP. It seems to me that not joining the EU would cost Sweden more than it lost in cheap trade, and that free global markets without preferences or government ties would harm Sweden’s engineering firms pretty badly.

Just the opposite of what is the case in Sweden today, where small companies are taxed to death with the highes taxes in the world while the very rich billionaires and companies escapes tax legally.

Down with the monopolies and the trade barriers !

Then we perhaps could lift the third world out of poverty !

Perhaps they had all been educated in Europe?

There would need to be more genuine consensus about the way to go from here. But this consensus is less probable now than it ever was given the economic situation in the industrial core. There is no real understanding about the right way to deal with the economic and social challenges of globalisation - as we can witness looking at the masses of globalisation enemies from all social strata putting forth all kinds of arguments.

The root cause of the problem the WTO (through its member governments) had to deal with is declining confidence in the ability of free trade to deliver social progress - especially with respect to interindustrial trade and development.