Like Wimbledon fortnight but without the aesthetic or entertainment value, the annual breakdown of the Doha round of trade talks is becoming a summer ritual. For three successive years, dark warnings of now-or-never and one-last-chance have ended in a fruitless ministerial meeting. It is time to be brave, swallow hard and accept that the Doha round in its present form has failed.

No one can say it has not had its chances. It cycles with increasing – and increasingly risible – frequency through rising optimism and crashing despair. Doha has always struggled. Launched with a huge agenda shortly after the attacks of September 11 2001, substantially for symbolic reasons, it lacked the big push from export interests needed to overcome the fierce resistance to liberalising agriculture, its main focus.