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 World Trade Organization (WTO) chief Pascal Lamy has abandoned attempts to restart the world trade talks. Lamy told ambassadors in Geneva that he has decided there was not sufficient consensus among major economies to call new ministerial talks on a trade deal.
The news came after the WTO held intensive consultations with US, India, China, Brazil and the European Union. WTO was hoping to convene a meeting in December to try and revive the stalled Doha trade round.
It had been urged to do so by the G20 summit of world leaders in November, who called for urgent trade talks by the end of the year.
It is unclear how strongly the incoming Obama administration will back the trade talks.
A spokesman for the US trade representative, Susan Schwab, said she was disappointed by the outcome, but added that there were still outstanding issues.
"There were more than a handful of issues on the table that needed to be resolved, all having the potential to stall the round," said USTR spokesperson Gretchen Hamel.
The EU also regretted the impasse. "We have come tantalizingly close to the finish line ... having come this far, we must not give up," EU Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton urged in a statement.
But Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, appeared to blame the rich countries, and especially the US, for the failure. "If there is failure or postponement, the most appropriate word that would apply would be greed," he told reporters.
A previous attempt to revive the trade talks in July ended in failure when rich and poor countries could not agree on how to end agricultural subsidies and trade barriers.
The Doha Round, which was launched in 2001, was intended to free world trade for the benefit of poor countries, and was particularly aimed at tackling barriers in agriculture.
But poor countries have been reluctant to open up their own agricultural and industrial sectors to free trade - and the growing economic slowdown is likely to make concessions even more difficult.
The seven-year negotiations, aimed at setting new rules for global commerce, have suffered a number of setbacks since Mr Lamy was appointed as the WTO director general in 2005.
Mercopress
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The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
But poor countries have been reluctant to open up their own agricultural and industrial sectors to free trade - and the growing economic slowdown is likely to make concessions even more difficult.
again it should be tit for tat as brasil wants it see how far they will grow .
even china is taking a look at brasils way of doing the rong business