From Thursday, the shaky prospects for freer world trade will rest on the shoulders of a French socialist. With the World Trade Organisation’s Doha round deadlocked and little time left to reach agreement, the new man in charge of the WTO, Pascal Lamy, faces a daunting challenge. that will test his good intentions and political skills to the limit. Unless the former European Union trade commissioner can help break the deadlock and hammer out the outlines of a deal before trade ministers meet in Hong Kong in December, hopes for a successful outcome to the Doha round will fade. That would be a disaster for the fragile world economy and for export-reliant developing countries in particular.

The omens are not good. The potential gains to poor countries from freer world trade dwarf those from debt relief and increased aid. But at the Group of Eight summit in Gleneagles in July, when public pressure for progress in “making poverty history” was intense, the assembled leaders could not even bring themselves to set a date for eliminating rich countries’ agricultural export subsidies, a relatively minor but particularly pernicious weapon in the protectionist armoury. If farming lobbies are powerful enough to outgun the Live8 campaign under the global media spotlight of the global media and refuse to make even token concessions towards helping the world’s poor, then the chances of them being strong-armed into giving up their subsidies at the WTO look slim.