The ‘Doha Round’ WTO expansion push was again defeated when a WTO summit in Geneva collapsed in acrimony on July 27, 2008. Attempts by a bloc of multinational corporations and allied governments to expand the WTO have failed since the high profile 1999 Seattle WTO ministerial. The demise of the latest Geneva WTO summit was a victory for small farmers, workers, civil society and developing nations.

One of the first countries to drop out was the Philippine government which served notice to walk away from Doha negotiations after hundreds of farmers, fishers and workers staged back-to-back pickets on July 24 to highlight to the government public opposition to the Doha Round. In front of the Department of Trade and Industry and the office of the National Economic and Development Authority the protestors delivered a special order from the people of the Philippines to defend the interests of poor Filipinos in the WTO negotiations. They reiterated their demand to the President to issue the marching orders to negotiators to walk away from an unfair and unjust Doha deal.

The WTO’s 14-year lifespan has sparked a dramatic wave of popular protest across the world, and this week’s talks were no different, with small farmers, fishers and workers protesting in various national capitals and teams of civil society activists traveling to Geneva to remind their countries’ WTO delegates of the political consequences at home of damaging compromises.

The proposal under consideration would have exacerbated the serious economic, food security and social problems now rocking numerous countries. Although the negotiations are formally dubbed the ‘Doha Round” WTO talks, they include many of the same items as the ‘Millenium Round’ WTO expansion proposed at the WTO Seattle summit that collapsed as protestors took to the streets and developing country negotiators stomped out of the negotiating suites over an agenda viewed as a threat to hundreds of millions of people.

The unwillingness of many countries to concede on particular themes was the proximate cause for the Geneva summit’s collapse, but government positions were based on strong public opposition in many poor and rich nations alike to expanding WTO scope and authority after more than a decade of experience of the WTO’s damaging outcomes.

Seven years of virtual deadlock since the Doha Round WTO expansion talks started signals that most WTO countries and their populations are seeking a different direction than what was offered with the Doha agenda. The WTO Secretariat and the small bloc of mainly rich country governments who stubbornly insist on continuing with the Doha WTO expansion agenda after it has been repeatedly rejected are the ones to blame for the repeated summit collapses and deadlocks. With the damaging socio-economic consequences of WTO implementation and an exclusive negotiating process at the summit having once again translated into a rejection of WTO expansion, the organization’s already-shaky legitimacy is nearing rock bottom.

Acknowledging the broad opposition among WTO member countries to aspects of the Doha Round agenda, WTO officials had called last week’s invitation-only mini-ministerial with the intention of allowing 35 of the WTO’s 153-member nations to participate in a selective process known as the “Green Room”. But even this exclusive process was abandoned by the third day of talks in favor of closed-door meetings among representatives from seven large countries. This so-called “G-7″ group completely excluded African and Caribbean countries, included only Japan and China from all of Asia and only Brazil from all of Latin America.

And this was the so-called Doha “Development” Round! The remaining trade ministers - mainly from poor countries - were left “in the dark sitting in the dark”, as the Indonesian trade minister complained. Kenya’s Deputy Prime Minister and Commerce Minister Uhuru Kenyatta spoke for the African countries in expressing similar anger. The seven large nations announced a tentative deal this weekend, warning that it represented a non-negotiable balance of interests. They declared to the press that a ministerial declaration resolving various issues was at hand. However, when this take-it-or-leave-it deal was brought back to the exclusive 35-country grouping, inquires began about the details. Over the past two days it became clear that the proposed modalities agreement was unacceptable to blocs of countries and the 8-day summit ended where it began: with countries in deep disagreement about the future direction of global trade rules and negotiations.