If there were a booby prize for statesmanship, this year's would go to Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, whose government, more than any other, was responsible for wrecking the Cancun trade talks. There's lots of blame to go around, but Brazil gets the gold star. It actively encouraged an atmosphere of North-South conflict straight out of the 1970s. Lula must recall that 1970s-style policies and rhetoric produced Latin America's "lost decade -10 years of stagnation and poverty. The World Bank had estimated that a successful agreement to lower tariffs would have raised global GDP by $500 billion by 2015, the bulk of that increase in wealth going to poor countries. That is why the obstructionist tactics of the big developing countries-Brazil, India, Nigeria-were so self-defeating. At the end of the day, any deal that reduces rich-country tariffs gives the poor some access to those huge markets. In the last global trade talks, signed in Uruguay in 1994, rich countries cut their tariffs by 20 percent. This time around, they were likely to cut "bound tariffs" by about 50 percent.
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