Vivek Dehejia in this Livemint  article, writes about the 'fog of spin and counter-spin' that has accumulated around the outcomes of the recently concluded 10th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), held in Nairobi.

He writes that "The most important decision, or non-decision ... was the failure of the final ministerial declaration to 'reaffirm' a commitment to the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), which was affirmed at the end of the Doha Ministerial Conference of the WTO as far back as November 2001, when smoke was, as it were, still rising from the embers of the World Trade Center in New York."

"In other words, the consensus ... was that no consensus was possible. But, given that the DDA has been reaffirmed at every ministerial conference since it was launched in 2001, what this means, in reality, is that the DDA is dead." 

"Having killed a development-oriented, genuinely multilateral, consensus-based process, a weakening but still powerful hegemon, the US, will seek to assert itself in the twilight of its ascendancy." 

Click here to read the full article.