Behind collapse of Cancun talk

THE dramatic collapse of the WTO’s Cancun ministerial meeting last Sunday had many causes. To date, it is still unclear what happened in the meeting’s last hours, whether the talks broke down due to any specific issue or whether time simply ran out.  

The immediate reason for the collapse was the inability to agree on whether to start negotiating new WTO agreements on the “Singapore issues” (investment, competition, procurement and trade facilitation), so-called because they were first introduced at the first WTO ministerial meeting in Singapore in 1996.