Economist's View: Doha Talks Break Down

The Doha round talks collapse once again:

Doha Round Talks Break Down On Farm Support, Trade Barriers, WSJ: Global
commerce talks at the World Trade Organization collapsed Monday as top powers
failed to agree on steps toward liberalizing trade in farm and manufactured
goods.

Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath said the talks had been suspended and added
that "it could take anywhere from months to years," to restart the negotiations.
"This is a serious setback, a major setback," said Brazilian Foreign Minister
Celso Amorim. ...

Bloomberg reports:

WTO Six-Way Talks Collapse, Jeopardizing Global Pact, Bloomberg: Talks among
six key World Trade Organization governments collapsed, imperiling efforts to
reach a global market-opening agreement worth billions of dollars.

Ministers from the U.S., the European Union, Brazil, India, Australia and
Japan remained deadlocked, prompting WTO Director- General Pascal Lamy to
suspend the five-year-old talks... Agriculture subsidies and tariffs have been
the main obstacles to reaching a WTO deal. ...

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said the U.S. is responsible for the
failure of the six-way talks. After last week's meeting of leaders from the
Group of Eight industrialized nations, each government ``except for the U.S.''
indicated that it would be more accommodating in yesterday's meeting, he said.

``The U.S. was unwilling to accept or even acknowledge the flexibility of
others shown in the room,'' Mandelson told a news conference. ``This action has
led to the round being suspended.''

The U.S. was the sole government among the six not to improve its offer,
Indian Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said.

``It's very clear that the EU made a movement, and everybody put something on
the table except for one country, who said we can't see anything on the table,''
he told reporters.

`Loopholes'

The U.S. didn't sweeten its offer to scale back spending on its farmers
because trade partners were more concerned with protecting sensitive commodities
such as beef with exemptions from tariff cuts, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike
Johanns said. Such ``loopholes'' may exclude up to 98 percent of commodities
from the cuts, he said, so a new U.S. offer was impossible. ``We didn't see
it,'' Johanns told a news conference. ``There was just nothing there that
allowed us to make that step.''

The G-8 leaders asked Lamy to find a way to break the stalemate by mid-August
and told their trade chiefs to push for an accord. ... The Doha Round ''is not
dead, but it's definitely between intensive care and the crematorium,'' Nath
said. ...