Doha Round in Deadlock

Yesterday's failure by World Trade Organisation negotiators to agree a framework for agriculture negotiations is the most severe blow yet to the ailing Doha trade round. The deadlock is more than just a stark reminder of the obstacles to progress in the talks: unless broken swiftly, it risks triggering backsliding into protectionism and economic strife.

Many factors have contributed to the impasse. But the most important is lack of clear leadership and high-level political commitment. Some observers, sensing this, argued at the outset that conditions were not ripe for a new trade round. Such Cassandra-like warnings may have been proved right. But they are now beside the point. For if the Doha talks fail, things will not simply revert to the status quo ante.

With the United Nations and Nato marginalised by Iraq war tensions, the World Trade Organisation is one of the few remaining hopes for multilateral co-operation. As guardian of rules that keep markets open, promote global integration and protect the weak as well as the strong, its role is crucial.

Collapse of the round would make those tasks far harder. By removing pressure on WTO members, particularly the US and the European Union, to co-operate, breakdown would risk re-igniting smouldering trade disputes, threatening a ruinous spiral of conflict that would undermine multilateral disciplines. It would also speed the rush into bilateral and regional trade deals, raising trading costs and ultimately dividing the world into rival blocs.

At risk is not just future liberalisation but a basic underpinning of the global economic order. Neither governments nor business can afford to view that peril with indifference. Getting the Doha talks back on track before the WTO's ministerial meeting in September is now an urgent priority.

Much needs to be done. The US must stop blocking a vital deal on drugs and medicines. Developing countries must unite around a coherent and positive agenda that recognises that they will gain by lowering their import barriers, while India, their self-appointed standard-bearer, needs to lead more constructively. And governments everywhere must stop pandering to anti-liberalisation activists and protectionist producers, such as US steel-makers, and start stating robustly why free trade matters.

But all that would be in vain without a breakthrough on agriculture. Here, the onus lies squarely on the EU. It pushed hardest to launch the Doha talks and to make them a "development" round. Yet it stubbornly denies poorer countries the freer farm trade many seek, while demanding "non-trade" WTO rules that few want. The EU's refusal to accept that its intransigence is the biggest stumbling-block is more than hypocritical self-delusion: it is reckless irresponsibility.

To be fair, Pascal Lamy and Franz Fischler, the trade and farm commissioners, know the EU's position is untenable. But they are obliged publicly to defend the indefensible as long as France - or more exactly Jacques Chirac, its president - opposes the reforms of the common agricultural policy that both men privately view as both essential and inevitable.

Mr Chirac's advocacy of a policy that severely harms poor countries conflicts with his claims to champion development. His championship of multilateralism is wholly at odds with his negative approach to the Doha round. It is time he resolved those contradictions. Doing so would not only earn him the stature of statesman for which he so clearly yearns; it would save the WTO from impending disaster and offer new hope for the troubled global economy.