ABSTRACT
‘This meeting has collapsed. Members have simply not been able to bridge their differences’ announced Pascal Lamy on Tuesday, 29 July 2008, after more than one week of negotiations on further trade liberalization by World Trade Organization (WTO) members. In particular, the Director General of the WTO said:
…there's no escaping the fact that the intensive efforts the whole membership has been putting in over the last days with the aim of establishing modalities in agricultural and NAMA [Non-agricultural market access – viz. industrial goods] have failed… Much has been achieved. Problems that had been intractable for years have been solved. [But] we have not been able to find convergence in the area of Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM). And we did not even get around to discuss cotton. 1
