Geneva, July 30 - Anti-globalisation groups on Wednesday hailed the collapse of talks on a new world trade treaty as a triumph for farmers, workers and the poor around the globe and a blow against "big business."
And even mainstream labour and farm groupings argued that the deal on the table at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Doha round negotiations over the past few days was so bad that it was just as well that it had been abandoned.
"Victory for small farmers, workers, civil society and developing nations," declared the U.S.-based Public Citizen group, which for over a decade has campaigned against the WTO and its drive to liberalise international trade.
"The mouldering corpse" of the round "should have been buried years ago," said its trade specialist Lori Wallach.
The failure of the Geneva negotiations "is a welcome respite for poor countries" in the face of an aggressive push by the rich powers for more free trade despite the global food and fuel crisis, said the Manila-based Focus on the Global South.
And the global ActionAid network said the shelving of the WTO's seven-year Doha Round was "a result of corporate greed in America and Europe" encouraged by governments in the European Union and the United States.
The package proposed by WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy would have increased problems for millions of poor people and reflected "the intransigence and insensitivity of rich countries who are not interested in the survival of small farmers, workers and jobs in developing countries," ActionAid said.
POWER AND SELF-INTEREST
That view was echoed by a religious group, the Fellowship of Christian Councils in Southern Africa. The WTO talks, it said, "have been driven by power and self-interest.
"The desperate need of the most vulnerable and marginalised people in our world for a trading system that could enable them to live their lives in dignity" had been lost in the negotiations, it said.
In France, whose government had opposed EU concessions on cutting farm subsidies to meet demands from developing countries for greater access to European markets, farmer groups expressed pleasure at what happened in Geneva.
The small farmers' Coordination Rurale, which has long campaigned against a WTO deal, said it was "delighted" that its members -- and workers around the globe -- would have respite from the threat of a free-for-all on agricultural markets.
But the president of France's big farmers' grouping FNSEA, Jean-Michel Lemetayer, said reason had triumphed because it had become clear in Geneva that better-off Asian and Latin American countries did not want to open their own markets.
The Brussels-based global labour union body ITUC, which does not oppose freer trade but argues that workers' interests must be firmly protected, said that to revive the Doha round the scope of the talks must be scaled down.
"Developed country governments have to assume their responsibilities to contribute some fairness to the world trading system and not require huge sacrifices (from poorer nations) in return for minimum commitments from their side," said ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder.