Special interests in France [url=http://www.hemscott.com/news/static/tfn/item.do?newsId=65852586582232]worked their magic[/url] with the Elysee, but that might have brought about a quick response from Lamy's cluster to remove those issues for later negotiation as a way to keep it from scuppering the rest of the agreement, something that has been in the works for almost SEVEN years.

No, what that did was [url=http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=3&article_id=94616]signal to others[/url], to a handful of developing countries' representatives that there wasn't much to lose in rejecting it themselves for their own reasons at the last moment - where they really weren't prepared to kill it 24 hours earlier.

The only solution to this is to have another set of short-term bilateral agreements or by groups in smaller numbers to buy some time to figure out just what it is the dissenting parties want.
Basically, if the EU, US, India, China, Brazil, Japan, and Korea, all with a few exclusions over the points of disagreement - got stop-gap deals in place, the dissenters' stinkbomb can be bypassed for now.

Alternately, they might realize that there might be consequences to obstruction that will see a WTO without them where they will just have to go back to coming to however many bilateral agreements that they need to, but lose the benefit of any of the work already puit into getting the WTO agreement this far.

The US, by the way, stuck it's neck out and made last minute concessions just to keep India and China on board, whereas the self-stated polyamorous fans of treaties and saccharin, generic, global kumbaya didn't seem to do that much for it at all.

Oddly enough there's this to be hopeful about: [i]Delegates said talks were faltering on the issue of the so-called special safeguard mechanism (SSM), which allows countries to protect poor farmers by imposing special tariffs on certain agricultural goods in case of an import surge or price fall.

Some developing countries such as India want that mechanism to kick in at a lower import-surge level than has been proposed, in order to protect their millions of poor farmers from starvation. Others want it to take effect at a higher rate.[/i]

What's hopeful about it? It says that there are smart people (unless it's just risky behaiviour for the sake of populism) who don't think that the commodities problem right now is permanent, otherwise they wouldn't stick to their guns on the protectionism that in the long run sharpens the effect of rising commodities cost on the poorest people.