The bricks are crumbling in the house of global trade and the Brics, those fashionable emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India, China, are crumbling, too, wracked by inflation, slackening growth and the flight of hot money.

In Geneva, Kamal Nath, the Indian Trade Minister, was gritting his teeth, doing his best to justify a wrecking operation that has earned him brickbats from all round. He has brought to an end a seven-year struggle for a global trade agreement that would open borders and reduce subsidies and he knows it.

However, he was not looking at his negotiating partners, the Brazilian, American, European and Argentinian ministers. He had his eyes fixed on Delhi, where the Indian Reserve Bank Governor was raising interest rates and signalling an economic slowdown.

Mr Nath's problem was the wretched farmers, not the East Anglian sugar barons or the American cotton kings, so often the butt of abuse. There is another group of farmers who wallow in subsidies, wreck government budgets and who demand high tariff walls to keep out imports of cheaper food.

These are India's peasantry and their political power is being felt on a global scale. Mr Nath could not afford to ignore them: India's rural population numbers 600 million, the last BJP Government was brought down for ignoring them and this Congress Party Government is unlikely to make that mistake.

The Indian farmers' demand for protection against import surges was the main obstacle to the tariff-cutting deal that failed in Geneva.

Mr Nath insisted on a “special safeguard mechanism” for certain agricultural products, notably pepper and oilseeds, that would allow India to impose swingeing tariff increases in the event of import surges.

It was a bizarre but alarming sideshow to the main thrust of the Doha Round of talks - a complex quid pro quo in which the emerging markets of Latin America and the Far East sought to trade access to EU and US agricultural markets in return for opening their doors to more American and European manufactured goods and services.

The Indian Trade Minister was casting himself in the guise of peasant victim, perched precariously on a bullock cart, accusing rich nations of “looking for commercial interests and enhancing prosperity rather than looking for content which reduces poverty”.

But India was opposed not just by the United States but by a host of developing nations in Latin America, including Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, which see Asia as their prime export market for meat, grain and oilseeds. Rice-exporting Thailand was also unhappy about the Indian demand.

In its favour, India has been joined by China - another nation with a big hinterland of peasant poverty - which wants protection for its rice and soya bean farmers, and a host of smaller developing nations riding on their coat-tails.

The trade row finally destroyed the fiction beloved by development charities and poverty lobbysits that we live in a world divided between North and South, or rich and poor.

Instead, we live on a globe of powerful and conflicting interest groups - Asian peasants versus Latin American farm labourers, for example. Within the WTO, factions are appearing, combining and dissolving at a rapid rate. Among some of the powerful interest groups that emerged three years ago to take on the consumer giants of Europe and America, cracks are opening.

The Group of 20, an emerging market body dedicated to attacking EU and US farm tariffs and subsidies, has lost cohesion. India has split with the Latin American pro-farm trade group. It now leads a Group of 33 nations, including many Caribbean states, angling for more protection for their rural populations.

Unfortunately, the emerging market powerhouses are looking a bit sickly. Their stock markets are plummeting and their economies are gripped by inflation and stuttering as export trade begins to slow. The clamour for protection from those who were beginning to see the benefits of trade has drowned out those who argued for compromise.

It is small wonder that India and China are championing the cause of peasants, because governments in both countries fear the wrath of rural communities suffering from rising fuel and food prices and the cost of credit.

The solution preferred in Delhi and Beijing is protection, but it is costly and India is already paying dearly for it. The country's budget deficit doesn't look too bad at 3 per cent of GDP, but that excludes fuel and fertiliser subsidies. Add those and the deficit is a shocking 7 per cent of GDP. Yet the Government has no choice but to pay to keep peasants on the farm. The average of India's maximum agricultural tariffs is more than 100 per cent and Mr Nath argued yesterday for measures to let it go higher still.

China, too, is ruled by the economics of the farm, not factories of Guangdong. According to Standard Chartered, the cost of food, which absorbs more than a third of income, is beginning to hit spending. Food is crowding out consumer goods, exposing the risk that China's factories will struggle to find domestic buyers to replace insolvent Americans.

There are no Brics, the world is coupled; exports represent 40 per cent of Chinese GDP and it is clear that politicians in Beijing and Delhi fear a slowdown that will shut down factories, reduce the safety valve of migration to the cities, transforming the rural migrant into a potential constituent of a mob.

It is political fear that ended the trade talks in Switzerland, fear of the countryside rampant.

carl.mortished@thetimes.co.uk

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