“The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” sneered Josef Stalin in 1935, upon hearing the suggestion that the Soviet Union go easy on its Catholic population.
Perhaps the world’s ag trade negotiators thought they’d get to lounge on the beach and sip margaritas when they arranged for their September 2003 session to occur in Cancun. If so, they must be sorely disappointed by the members of the World Trade Organization failing to meet a March 31 deadline for an agreement on “modalities”--a set of negotiating principles for liberalizing the international trade in farm products.