New Delhi, 5 Aug 2008. After the break up come the recriminations. The World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Round trade talks in Geneva had been billed as a last ditch effort to save the talks. When they failed, fingers were pointed.

The Americans and much of the west blamed China and India for coming up with ‘last minute’ objections, purposefully throwing their weight around, puffed up with a growing sense of their own importance. China and India laid the blame squarely at the feet of the Americans and the other rich countries who have plundered the rest of the world for centuries and now want to plunder some more, all while coddling their farmers.

While there are grains of truth in what both sides are saying, reality is a little more complex.

It is less complicated, however, to understand who the losers are. Poorer countries will continue to see poverty levels increase. Faced with heavily subsidized products from more advanced countries, they will drift further behind in technological know-how.

“It is a little bit sickening to think that well-fed farmers and rich landed families in the west are paid money by their governments to ship agricultural products and other goods to be sold at each cheap prices in some of the poorest countries in the world,” said Hosni Afleck, Chief Analayst at EconomyWatch.com.

“While the Chinese and the Indians do have their own problems with poverty, on scale so vast it is difficult for outsiders to imagine, some of their policies hint at a new kind of Asian imperialism that we might see unfolding as this century progresses.”

Overall, Africa is probably the biggest loser on a deal that might have added a trillion dollars to World GDP.

With elections due now in the US and India, analysts suspect that the earliest a deal can be concluded would be in 2011 – 2012. If the world economy continues to worsen, however, natural protectionist instincts might come to the fore across many countries, and the mood may turn decisively against globalization and its underlying support structures such as the WTO.

Santos de la Raya, EconomyWatch.com