Talks Collapse

So near but so far.

Thank you India and China and the nine neanderthals within the EU.

This from the International Herald Tribune

A high-level summit meeting to salvage a global trade pact collapsed Tuesday after the United States, China and India failed to compromise on farm import rules, according to trade officials.
Trade diplomats, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said that the meeting of seven commercial powers collapsed here at the World Trade Organization's headquarters.
Officials, two from advanced economies and one from a developing nation, told The Associated Press that a U.S. dispute with China and India over farm import safeguards had effectively ended any hope of a breakthrough. The comments were confirmed by a European official, who was also not authorized to comment publicly.
They said that the WTO chief, Pascal Lamy, had informed ministers that an agreement could not be reached after more than a week of talks.
There was no immediate word on whether the participants would seek to meet again in 2008 to try to salvage the talks.

The United States accused India and China of seeking to backtrack on an agreement in principle made Friday. Washington accused the two emerging powers of insisting on allowances to raise farm tariffs above even their current levels.
India denied that it ever approved the previous text.
On Tuesday, ministers considered a new compromise proposal on the issue, brokered largely by the European negotiators, at what has now become the longest-ever ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization.
"The general feeling is disbelief that this could go down over special safeguard measures," one official close to the negotiations, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said before the collapse. "It risks becoming a totemic issue: subsistence farming versus commodity exports."
Politically, any deal would have been difficult to sell in India.
The main complication, said another diplomat who was also not authorized to speak publicly, is that the Indian negotiator, Kamal Nath, comes from "an electoral region that is completely opposed to the idea of a deal."
At present, India does not have a safeguard mechanism for its farmers, though developed countries can invoke special measures to protect some of their goods if imports climb sharply.