For sheer foaming carpet-chewing frustration it is hard to beat world trade talks, as they have crawled their way like a crippled snail from the protectionist nightmare of the 1930s through the GATT mechanism and into the WTO.

The Doha round - named after the capital of Qatar where they were launched - is the first major global trade initiative since the founding of the WTO at the conclusion of the Uruguay round of GATT negotiations. The latest reports from Cancun, where the WTO is now meeting, talk alarmingly of the Doha process "collapsing" over the issue of rich-nation agricultural subsidies.

For anyone with an iota of free-trade sympathy, economic literacy or merely concern for the bulk of the world's poor ("third-world" farmers), the current state of agricultural protectionism is outrageous to the point of incomprehensibility. British politicians have described the CAP (Europe's "Common Agricultural Policy") as "evil" - a label which may lack economic nuance, but captures the essence of the situation perfectly.

Every year the combined effect of European, Japanese and US agricultural policies is to kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of the world's most economically desperate people, imprisoning hundreds of millions more in hopeless destitution by radically blighting the development prospects of entire regions.

Rich countries spend US$300 billion on agricultural subsidies every year, encouraging overproduction that depresses world prices for agricultural products. US cotton subsidies of US$4 billion per annum on domestic production worth US$3 billion have halved the price of the commodity since 1997, wrecking the economies of those (mostly African) countries that depend upon it. James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, has pointedly noted that the average European cow receives more in annual subsidy than the income of the average African farmer. Japan places tariffs on rice amounting to an insane 1,000 per cent.

The rich-world's foreign aid budgets, totalling about US$60 billion, are dwarfed by this catastrophe. To adapt a remark from the aptly named "Apocalypse Now": after machine-gunning the world's poor with its agricultural subsidies, the developed nations hypocritically attempt to patch-up the damage with charity band-aids.

There are glimmers of hope in the gloom. The US has made wild promises to co-operate in the comprehensive elimination of trade barriers, which it should be held to. Better still, there are definite signs of consolidation among leading developing nations, including China, India, Brazil and South Africa, who have formed a common grouping to collectively demand the prioritization of agricultural trade reform within the WTO. It is this initiative, met by the all-too-familiar obduracy of rich-world agricultural protectionists, which triggered the Doha crisis.

The World Bank estimates a successful Doha round could raise world incomes by over US$500 billion by 2015, with over half the benefit going to developing countries, lifting 144 million people out of poverty. Yet rich countries seem set to block such progress out of deference to their tiny but vociferous farming lobbies. Madness? Or maybe evil?

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