GENEVA — The outcome of the World Trade Organization ministerial midterm review in Cancun, Mexico (Sept. 12-14), was an unmitigated disaster. The United States, European Union and Japan share equal responsibility for failing to stand by the commitments they had made in the Doha Declaration of November 2001. As the rich countries seem determined to continue discriminating against developing countries — mainly, but not exclusively, in agriculture — not surprisingly a number of developing countries, led by Brazil, China, India and South Africa, formed their own alliance, the Group of 21.
The failure at Cancun has certainly set back the global trade agenda and diminished prospects for reducing global poverty as set out in the Millennium Development Goals. In Cancun, Japan was both massively present and conspicuously absent — with one important exception. Let me explain this apparent contradiction.
Japan had a huge delegation of officials — 235 — by far the biggest, as far as I could tell. This compares with 53 officials from China, 59 from India and 132 from the U.S. As most of the time nothing was happening in Cancun — since the agenda could not be moved forward — taxpayers in Japan may want to ask themselves what all of these 235 officials were doing?