Farewell interviews by senior diplomats are usually modelled on Oscar
speeches - lots of thanks and praise to the talented team behind the great man or woman. Not so for Mike Moore, the blunt speaking New Zealander who until last Friday was head of the World Trade Organisation. It takes a special genius to pick a time when fears of a new trade war between the European Union and the US are looming to launch a broadside at the WTO's 500 Geneva-based staff. In his last interview in the job, Mr Moore lambasted his former colleagues for their lack of professionalism, loyalty and hard work, provoking a furious reaction from the in-house union.
Grading his performance over the last three years, Mr Moore gave himself an "A minus" for getting the organisation's fractious members to agree to launch a new round of trade talks in Doha last November - although he admitted the collapse of the first attempt two years earlier in Seattle deserved an "F".
His staff are unlikely to assess him so generously. Mr Moore leaves his successor, former Thai finance minister Supachai Panitchpakdi, with a demoralised and unhappy organisation and an enormous task: steering the WTO's 145 members to a successful conclusion of the new round of global trade talks by the deadline of 2005.
In a year's time, Mr Supachai faces his first big test when trade ministers gather for a mid-term progress report in Cancun, Mexico. On present form, it will be one of the shortest international meetings of all time: virtually no progress has been made since Doha. "When ministers meet in Mexico, they will be in state of complete and furious disagreement," predicts one trade analyst.
To add to ministerial woes, tens of thousands of US anti-globalisation
protestors are expected to descend on the conference as well Mexico's version of Che Guevara, Commandante Marcos. Cancun is rapidly shaping up to be Seattle by the beach.
The spirit of cooperation between Washington and Brussels which enabled the Doha round to be launched on November 14 has proved ephemeral. Since then, America's decision to impose punitive tariffs on foreign steel imports and to authorise an 80% rise in agricultural subsidies has infuriated its biggest trading partner and raises the risk of a renewed cold war between them.
"Without terrorist attacks on the US there would have been no agreement at Doha," says Duncan Green, a policy adviser at Catholic aid agency Cafod. "The period between September 11 and the fall of Kabul on November 14 marked the high point of US multilateralism."
There is little love lost between European governments and the Bush
administration - as a succession of leaders made clear at the recent world summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg. Europe is angry about American unilateralism in the war on terror, in the Middle East and over global warming.
If Brussels is looking for an opportunity to get its own back, it has been handed the ultimate weapon. Last Friday, a WTO dispute panel authorised it to impose $4bn worth of trade sanctions in a long running fight over tax breaks for American multinationals like Boeing and Microsoft. It is the largest retaliation measure ever approved by the WTO and the US trade representative, Robert Zoellick, has warned it would be the equivalent of detonating a nuclear bomb.
So far, Europe's top trade negotiator, Pascal Lamy, has shown no signs of wanting to escalate already tense transatlantic relations. The fact that the EU chose to challenge the American tax breaks at all is a testament to how bad relations between the two can get. The case was brought by Mr Lamy's predecessor, Sir Leon Brittan, as direct revenge for the humiliations Europe suffered at the WTO over beef and bananas.

Honeymoon hiatus
Trade observers worry that this kind of tit-for-tat behaviour is how
protectionist trade wars start. While the administration has promised to amend its legislation, hardline forces within Congress who resent having America's tax code dictated by bureaucrats in Geneva will be pressing for Europe's tax laws also to come under the spotlight. No immediate crisis is likely. Mr Supachai's arrival is likely to usher in at least a brief honeymoon in Geneva and the EU will not want to aggravate tensions with Washington ahead of November's mid-term elections.
The road to Cancun is littered with obstacles. Mr Supachai must win the trust of the US - which backed his rival, Mr Moore, for director general's job, forcing them to split the term. The global economy has taken a turn for the worse, inflaming protectionist lobbies in the US and Europe. Then there is the thorny issue of cutting agriculture subsidies, which proved a stumbling block in the last round of global trade talks. Tensions over agriculture could blow up as early as next March, when WTO members must agree the framework for cutting export subsidies in the new round. There has been no meeting of minds so far. Progress has been minimal.
Agricultural charges America's proposal that average agricultural tariffs should be reduced from 60% to 15% and spending on subsidies be cut by $100bn worldwide was greeted with howls of derision by the EU. Member states said Washington's decision to authorise the farm bill proved its stance on agriculture was hypocritical. The EU has failed to advance a counter-proposal of its own and has disappointed developing countries and the Cairns group of agricultural free traders with its unambitious plan for reforming the common agricultural policy. The chief opponent of reform is France, which some observers believe is adopting an almost Trotskyite approach to negotiations in the hope of precipatating a crisis.
"The French believe you need talks to break down completely so that
everybody lowers their expectations," says one former trade negotiator and long-time observer of the Geneva scene. The source added that while this tactic enabled the French to block significant agricultural reform in the Uruguay round, since Seattle the
stakes have become much higher. A WTO crisis now would take place in the full glare of the world's media and to the accompanying cheers of the anti-globalisation movement.
Sense should prevail. The state of the world economy suggests that the EU and the US should opt for jaw-jaw rather than war-war. The Americans need to export to Europe to reduce their trade deficit, running at almost $40bn a month, while the only bit of the European economy which is providing any boost to growth is the export sector.
In the present circumstances, a collapse in negotiations or a return to tit-for-tat tariffs increases could trigger the double dip recession the financial markets fear. In trade talks, as in diplomacy, common sense does not always prevail.

Port out: Europe's vintage complaints
Europe's counterstrike against the Cairns group of agricultural free traders could hardly have been better targeted. In July the European commission announced that progress on cutting farm tariffs depended on the rest of the world agreeing to new rules protecting the use of traditional terms in the food and wine sectors. Europe has already forced the New World wine makers who make up the backbone of the Cairns group - South Africa, Canada, New Zealand,
Australia, Chile and Argentina - to stop using geographical indicators such as champagne, port and hock. Now it wants to extend geographical protection to food, and is laying claim to generic winemaking terms like "reserve" and "vintage". The proposal has dismayed the New World wine industry. If it succeeds, Australia, the world's fourth largest wine exporter - behind France, Italy and Spain - may find it harder to market its goods in Europe, according to a report by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (Abare) yesterday.
"Although protection of these generic expressions is being introduced under the guise of helping consumers make informed decisions, such measures may actually cause confusion for wine consumers by restricting the use of everyday terms," said the bureau's executive director, Brian Fisher. Technically, negotiations on geographical terms are not part of the trade talks begun last November in Doha. Peter Carl, the European commission's director-general for trade, made clear in July that the price of Europe giving up subsidies to farmers was more protection for the food industry in other areas.
"There are those countries who want to have their cake and eat it," he said. "[They] want very substantial negotiations on agricultural products ... and are at the same time questioning the extension of geographical indications to cover potentially all agricultural products." The commission's tactics have upset trade analysts. "The global language of food and wine is European because Europeans took the language and their food and wine with them when they settled all over the world," said Rachel Thompson, of consultancy Apco. "It's a bit rich for them to claim exclusive rights over terms which have become generic."