Ding Dong Doha's Dead.

Despite Gordon Browns assurances at the G8 summit that the Doha round of World Trade Organisation talks would be ratified today the WTO meeting in Geneva have collapsed without ratification.

Some of you may be confused as to why a round of talks held Geneva are named after a place which isn't even on the same continent. The reason for this is quite simple the talks are named after the location where they were first meant to be ratified way back in 2001. Although being a doorstep of paper written in the driest of diplomatic terms the Doha agreement was primarily concerned with cutting the subsidies that governments of developed countries paid to their farmers and abolishing taxes that farmers in developing countries would have to pay on imported fertilisers and farm equipment.

This would have made it economically viable for farmers in developing countries such as India, Thailand and Zimbabwe to export their produce to markets in developed countries such as the USA and France and have the knock on effect of increasing global food production averting the current global food crisis and cutting the cost of food worldwide.

As they are one of the countries hit hardest by the global food crisis it was always going to be difficult to get India to sign up to a trade agreement which was in direct contravention to it's recently imposed ban on rice exports. I however I think the main diplomatic mistake was to piss off China by making up fairy stories about it's involvement in Africa and a load of middle class posing over the "Great firewall of China". This last point is especially ironic as the UK is in the process to introducing similar technology in order to protect it's citizens from the bits of the Internet of which it's government does not approve.