Who killed Cancun?
But let us start with the currently fashionable parlour game: who killed Cancun? Some believe that Cancun was just an accident. That we were going along in the same old WTO way towards a deal, that we could have made it and we were just a hard day’s night away from success. This is not a wholly discreditable view: the Geneva preparation of the Cancun meeting had not been bad for once, although Geneva, seemingly like everyone else, collectively missed the important issue of cotton. And the EU and US had come up with a framework deal on agriculture, as requested. And then suddenly, like a party that ends too early, the meeting just fell apart. The second set of explanations play down the sense of Cancun as an accident, except in the sense of an “accident waiting to happen.” They point out that not everything was rosy in the Cancun garden, pointing out that the negotiation itself barely got under way at all and, after a few days of inconclusive consultations, aborted shortly after getting
