Picking up on my use of medical metaphors to describe Doha last week, Simon Evenett describes the patient’s worsening condition:

India’s trade minister said the Doha Round was in intensive care last year; if that was the case then, now it appears to be in terminal decline…

The blame for this Round’s debacle lies squarely on the shoulders of WTO member governments, Mr. Lamy and the WTO secretariat should not be sacrificial lambs…

In past WTO negotiations, countries exchanged cuts in their bound rates. Since bound and applied rates were about the same thing, exporters in all nations had something to gain from pushing their governments to sign the deal. But now with so much unilateral reform, the proposals for bound rate cuts attract little support from exporters. Rich country exporters can ask: Why lobby for finishing Doha when you have already got the increased export opportunities for free?…

Indeed, while so many have been worrying about how the spread of regionalism and bilateralism in recent years has undermined the multilateral trading system, in fact many of the termites eating away at the Doha Round are associated with unilateral trade reform…

The Doha round is now almost dead. All that remains is for someone to discreetly turn the life support machine off.

If the Doha round’s collapse is seen as a loss for free traders, they may be victims of their own success.