Doha Round Collapses. Yeah, You Heard Me Right.

Thanks to U.S. truculence over that cornerstone principle of American governance, farm subsidies, the Doha Round of international trade talks has collapsed, the Los Angeles Times reports--amid "bitter recriminations," yet. The U.S. tosses blame back at the European Union for not being open enough to foreign farm products.

The last round of international trade talks, the Uruguay round, similarly fell apart, but after three years a reconciliation and eventual agreement was reached back in 1993.

Read the whole article for further recriminations, beefs over beef, and how disappointed American business interests, ag and not, are over the breakdown.

Business Week a few months back questioned the overall value of an agreement at Doha, and noted that any failure can really be laid at the feet of the developing nations, since

at the insistence of developing countries, Doha largely ignored trade in services, even though many economists believe that the consumer benefits from liberalization of services--from advertising to banking--are far greater than the remaining opportunities in goods trade. That may have been a miscalculation by the poor nations. With little to gain on the services front, the U.S. and Europe have less motivation to budge on the farm and factory issues that developing nations care most about.