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World trade
World trade
Jul 27th 2006
From The Economist print edition
AT LAST it is official. After stumbling on for months, the Doha trade talks have collapsed. On July 24th, at the end of yet another futile gathering of trade ministers in Geneva, Pascal Lamy, the World Trade Organisation's director general, formally suspended the negotiations. He set no date for their resumption. As Kamal Nath, India's trade minister put it, the Doha round is definitely between intensive care and the crematorium.
Launched in the Qatari capital in 2001, soon after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, the Doha round was to be an ambitious effort to make globalisation more inclusive and help the world's poor, particularly by slashing barriers and subsidies in farming, the rich-world's most molly-coddled industry.
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