Word: geneva
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...Geneva Free-Trade Failure After seven years of negotiations, the World Trade Organization's Doha round of free-trade talks collapsed over reluctance to relinquish protective trade barriers. Though the U.S. and the E.U. offered to reduce their farming subsidies, talks reached an impasse as China and India, emboldened by their rapid economic growth, insisted on the right to protect their farmers from competition and refused to accept a compromise...
...return for an as-yet-unverified declaration of the components of Pyongyang's nuclear program and the disabling of a key reactor. Bush cleared the way for Rice's top diplomat, William Burns, to break with a long-standing policy and meet face to face with the Iranians in Geneva on July 19. Rice says in public that these moves are the result of years of diplomacy, but a senior State Department official privately admits they are part of an effort to "push this thing as far as it can go" in the last six months of the Bush Administration...
There was a sense of inevitability about the latest collapse in global trade talks. Negotiators, meeting in Geneva, had seemed optimistic a few days earlier, hopeful of a breakthrough in the seven-year-old Doha round. But as so often, hope was no match for the strength of entrenched positions. After the breakdown, there were the usual murmurings that trade ministers might get together again to salvage something from the wreckage. But most observers found it hard to escape the conclusion that, this time, Doha really was dead...
Following the failure in Geneva, there was the usual rush to gloom, the usual voices warning darkly of the risk of a beggar-my-neighbor protectionism, redolent of the 1930s. That is always possible. But it is important to remember just what we are fretting about. A trade dispute - a trade war, even - is a far cry from a real one, the sort of war fought with bullets and bombs. Not so long ago, doomsayers predicted a rising China or India would lead to certain conflict with established powers. Instead, both countries are active players in a system that, creaking...
...experts agree. "The Libyans are stupid enough to act irrationally," says Conrad Gerber, president of Petro-Logistics, a Geneva oil consultancy firm. "They produce 1.7 million barrels a day, yielding billions of dollars, so the small Swiss market is a drop in a bucket for them...