Unsurprisingly, the Cancun round of WTO negotiations has collapsed.

Developing countries blame the EU and (to a lesser extent) the US and Japan for refusing to give up farm subsidies and agricultural export subsidies. Fair point. The current global agricultural trade regime is the scummiest thing the developed world has given the developing world since syphilis, and there’s pretty strong bipartisan agreement on that score. Multipartisan agreement, even. Obviously, we should abolish these unilaterally, tomorrow, WTO or no WTO.

That said, the developing countries did themselves no favours by rejecting the “Singapore issues” – making government procurement transparent, enforcing antitrust rules, reducing non-tarrif barriers, and cutting restrictions on foreign investment. Since corruption is one of of the main other things keeping poor countries poor, and the primary result of all four measures above would be to reduce corruption, it’s hard to view developing world governments’ opposition as principled…

Anyway. Lots of people will say more articulate things about this than me. Some, or possibly all, of them will be entirely wrong. So will I, probably…

I’m also rather interested in the behaviour of the US. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick told reporters that poor countries’ unrealistic goals were to blame. Now, Mr Zoellick hadn’t staked his reputation on the Singapore issues – rather, these were pushed by the EU*. A good political move for Mr Zoellick, it would seem, would have been to try and negotiate a compromise that involved retracting the EU’s insistence on Singapore altogether. Suddenly, the US is a friend of the developing world against European badness. Hooray! God bless America, etc.

But he didn’t – instead, he sided with the EU’s position, and then cried crocodile tears when everything fell apart. Could this be a US government attempt at a touchy-feely reunion with its European ex-friends? The timing of the desperately needed new Iraq resolution in the UN Security Council, the petulant opposition of France, and France’s position as the leading beneficiary from the EU’s bizarre agricultural system are (of course) entirely coincidental.

Oh well. Hopefully it’ll only be third-world farmers, and not both third-world farmers and the people of Iraq who are sacrificed on this ridiculous (but necessary, until EU and UN reform removes arrogant, marginalised ex-powers from positions of great power) altar.

* a cynic might claim the EU was never going to do much about farm subsidies, and poor countries were never going to acccept Singapore, so insisting on the latter gave EU negotiator Pascal Lamy an excellent get-out clause…