Head of Trade Policy at UK-based Christian Aid, Dr Claire Melamed, blames bloodyminded EU delegates for the failure of WTO talks in Mexico. But she argues that for poor people no deal is better than a bad deal, and says developing countries have started to stand up to the feudal robber baron tactics of Europe and the United States.

At 3.30 on Sunday afternoon George Odour Ong’wen from Kenya descended an escalator in Cancún’s convention centre and proclaimed Mexico’s world trade summit over. Talks had broken down, he said. Kenya had walked out and the fifth ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation was over.

This was a highly dramatic moment, but there is a theatre to international diplomacy that often obscures its importance. Real people’s lives are playing out in the wings.

As the meeting in Mexico was beginning, Christian Aid was hosting Britain’s trade secretary, Patricia Hewitt, as she visited poor farmers in nearby Honduras.

Ms Hewitt will probably never forget the welcome she was given when she arrived at the tiny house owned by rice farmer María Marcos Rivera.

The diminutive 62-year-old Honduran woman threw her arms around the politician and embraced her like a long-lost friend.

Honduras’ rice farmers were all but wiped out during the 1990s because of cheap imports of rice from the United States.

Marcos finally stopped planting two years ago. But recently the government of Honduras has begun to protect rice farmers and the production of rice is picking up. It is also planning to help farmers like Rivera with seeds and fertiliser.

On hearing this, Ms Hewitt nodded and smiled and agreed that these were important measures for developing countries to have at their disposal.

It had been raining hard when the secretary of state arrived in Marcos' village, but the clouds lifted and as Marcos and Ms Hewitt shared a simple lunch together, the arcane machinations of the WTO meeting, which had already begun, seemed a million miles away.

Three days later and Kenya, a country where millions share María Marcos Rivera’s struggle to make a living from the land, was heralding an end to the talks.

Some say determination on the part a group of bigger developing countries, such as Malaysia and Brazil, not to accept a poor deal forced the talks over the edge.

Others claim it was the intransigence of wealthier countries such as South Korea and Japan that hastened their closure.

Most agree that the European Union, led in the negotiations by the charismatic Pascal Lamy, overplayed its hand in trying to get all 146 members of the WTO accept four new areas of negotiation in the current round of trade talks.

Whatever the truth, it’s clear that ministers were just too far apart on key issues – including those that would make most difference to people like Marcos.

Some of the most contentious areas of the draft text produced for Cancún, and revised on Saturday, related to how far developing countries would be allowed to protect their own markets.

The governments of developing countries were demanding that the WTO guarantee their rights to help farmers facing impossible competition from cheap imports, while rich countries were demanding that developing countries throw open their borders as the price of any reduction in agricultural subsidies.

Angry at being stonewalled by a group of countries they can usually bully and cajole into acceptance, rich nations accused the developing countries of refusing to take negotiations seriously.

“There were can-do countries here and there were won’t-do countries,” snarled Robert Zoellick, the U.S. trade secretary, in his closing press briefing.

Pascal Lamy said the current round of trade talks was not dead, “but it certainly needs intensive care.”

Both are wrong.

It was not the blocking of developing countries that was the cause of the summit’s death.

It was the sheer bloodymindedness of Lamy and the EU in insisting that the WTO dance to its tune.

And the current round of talks -– which has been dubbed a development round by a generation of politicians anxious to earn poverty-busting brownie points -– has been woken from a two-year-long coma by the arrival of a group of developing countries with rather different ideas.

The collapse of the Cancún meeting is not a disaster.

If it does nothing else it means the European Union has almost certainly failed in its bid to open talks in the WTO about rule-making on foreign investment and competition policy.

These have faced stiff opposition since they were first mooted in 1996 WTO meeting in Singapore.

More than half the member states of the WTO opposed them in the run-up to Cancún and warned the European Union that they would stick to their guns.

They did.

For developing countries the WTO is also steadily maturing into an organisation where they can do more than just block and oppose.

Had Lamy and his 15-strong council of European ministers – including Patricia Hewitt – given up earlier on their new issues, then negotiations would have moved on to discussing the measures most needed by poor countries.

If anyone is to blame for lack of progress in the "development round" then it’s these 16 people.

Along with the Americans, they have behaved like feudal robber barons for too long.

Perhaps now they will begin to understand that the WTO can only work for development if it is allowed to operate by consensus.

Maria Marcos Rivera, for her part, is unlikely to forget the day the British cabinet minister came for lunch.

After the collapse of the talks in Cancún, she is, at least, no worse off.

She may be able to begin farming again provided her government can keep at bay the United States, which is putting pressure directly on the Honduran government to end its new rice agreement.

No deal in Cancún was better for Rivera than a bad deal.

But a good deal, which explicitly recognised the right of Honduras to protect her market for rice, would have been better.

Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters.