Global Trade Talks Collapse

There was a sense of inevitability about the latest collapse in global trade talks. Negotiators, meeting in Geneva, had seemed optimistic a few days earlier, hopeful of a breakthrough in the seven-year-old Doha round. But as so often, hope was no match for the strength of entrenched positions. After the breakdown, there were the usual murmurings that trade ministers might get together again to salvage something from the wreckage. But most observers found it hard to escape the conclusion that, this time, Doha really was dead.

This round of trade negotiations was supposed to be about "development," which made it ironic that the proximate cause of the failure was the claim by developing nations that not enough was being done to protect their farmers, like the Indian pictured above, from a surge of rich-world imports. But the precise rock on which the talks foundered — if it hadn't been one, it would have been another — was less significant than the evident power and influence that developing nations now have on the international economic agenda. Seven years ago, before Iraq, the subprime meltdown and $140-a-barrel oil, the world economic order was easier to maneuver. But the intervening years have seen huge growth — and concomitant influence — outside the U.S., Japan and Western Europe.

Following the failure in Geneva, there was the usual rush to gloom, the usual voices warning darkly of the risk of a beggar-my-neighbor protectionism, redolent of the 1930s. That is always possible. But it is important to remember just what we are fretting about. A trade dispute — a trade war, even — is a far cry from a real one, the sort of war fought with bullets and bombs. Not so long ago, doomsayers predicted a rising China or India would lead to certain conflict with established powers. Instead, both countries are active players in a system that, creaking though it may be, has helped drag tens of millions of people out of poverty. Sure, we disagree. But we're doing it in meeting rooms in Switzerland, not across some corpse-littered field.