LONDON -- Gordon Brown, the British chancellor of the exchequer and likely successor to Prime Minister Tony Blair, has declared publicly his strong support for a successful conclusion to the Doha round of world trade negotiations. He has called for new mechanisms to break the global logjam on trade and has condemned ideologies "that support protectionism" as "little more than the modern equivalent of Luddism." (Luddite workers broke up machinery at the start of the 19th century, thinking that it was causing unemployment.)
Unfortunately, the Doha round has been stalled and it is going to be very difficult to get it going again. The biggest stumbling bloc is agriculture. Americans accuse the Europeans of adhering obstinately to the protectionist devices incorporated in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). This accusation has some validity although there have been some significant CAP reforms.
Europeans accuse the Americans of hypocrisy for pretending that U.S. agricultural subsidies are not what they seem or for putting off ending their subsidies on the contrived assumption that Europeans will never abandon the CAP. The most egregious of American subsidies are on cotton, a crop of great significance for some poor developing countries.