The WTO summit

Europeans had nothing to be proud of at Cancun. Our economic superpower -- so rich that it can pay every farmer 17,000 a year each in public subsidies -- had a decisive role in the failure of the summit: we impeded an agreement with Third World countries where the majority of the population lives on less than 2 a day. Our negotiators brought back home intact the agricultural protectionism that is anachronistic and cause for global shame.

An agreement (at the summit), it was calculated, could have saved an estimated 144 million people from poverty.

From the disaster there is only one thing to celebrate: The new politics which manifested itself in the emergence of a coalition of 23 developing countries.

The wrecking of the WTO is not a defeat for globalization, but rather the victory of a more savage and less regulated globalization.

Cancun was the occasion for showing what values we want to present to the rest of the world.

Europe failed the trial, and such an important test does not arise often.

-- La Repubblica, Rome