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At the chair's meeting on Wednesday, the US said it cannot accept even the diluted provisions for export credits in the joint proposal, according to agriculture negotiators present at the meeting. The US demands, said an agriculture negotiator, is "tantamount to special and differential treatment only for itself and a broad exemption from multilateral disciplines."

In their letter, civil society highlighted that success in Nairobi must mean “[f]ulfilling the development mandate by strengthening SDT for all developing countries, removing WTO obstacles to food security, and operationalizing benefits for the [LDCs].”

The corporate and rich country government agenda of permanently abandoning the development mandate must be forestalled, along with the imposition of a set of already-rejected or ill-defined non-trade ‘new issues’.”

Experts have detailed how governments won’t be able to implement many aspects of the deal, however, if agreements like the TPP, TTIP [PDF] or TiSA come into force. Much the same could be said about the WTO. Developing country unity and North-South peoples’ solidarity will be essential to a positive outcome at the WTO. Let’s make sure that the United States, the EU, Japan, Australia and others realize that the imperative of development and public interests must come before corporate profit. A good deal should be struck in Nairobi. But if not, then no deal is better than a bad deal.

There are increasing efforts with global value chains, and a stronger mandate to work on their governance, so as to address unfair distribution of gains across the chain and the resulting detrimental impacts on employment conditions and inclusive growth .

Shockingly, developed countries even opposed inclusion of the issue of policy space. What is policy space? By this we mean that developing countries must be free from imposed international strictures and rules that go against their development needs.

After this conference, no country from the EU, nor the US or other developed countries, can claim to be in favor of developing countries’ escaping the debt treadmill.

Unfortunately, the rich countries’ club of the OECD has thus far dominated international discussions on taxation, which leave out developing countries and their development concerns. On taxation, UNCTAD 14 sadly became yet another example of how determined rich countries are to ensure the exclusion of developing countries, not just from decision making on tax matters, but also from the possibility of getting independent advice on how to stop the enormous losses of money they suffer from illicit financial flows,

Before discussing its limits, I will summarize Professor Stiglitz’s response to the problem he calls “market failure.” Professor Stiglitz attributes “market failure” to “lack of transparency.” He has several recommendations on how to check market failure. The first is that government needs to bridge the gap between social returns and private returns, both to encourage socially necessary investment as in agriculture and to discourage socially undesirable investment as in real estate speculation. Second, the government may set up specialized development banks. In support, he cites the negative example of America’s private banks and their “dismal performance” alongside the positive example of Brazil’s development bank, a bank twice the size of the World Bank, and its “extraordinary success” in leading that country’s economic transformation. Finally, Professor Stiglitz cautions against liberalizing financial and capital markets as advised by the Washington Consensus.

I am not an economist, but I have been forced to learn its basics to defend myself in the academy and the world. Like you, I live in a world where policy discourse has been dominated – I should say colonized – by economists whose vision is limited to the economy. Professor Stiglitz derides this as “free market fundamentalism” and I agree with him. Like fundamentalist generals who think that the conduct, outcome and consequence of war is determined by what happens on the battlefield, the thought of fundamentalist economists not only revolves around the market but is also limited by it. Just as war is too important an activity to be left to generals, the material welfare of peoples is also too important to be left to economists alone.

The Eurozone was created as a single currency for Europe but without constituting Europe as a democratic polity. The result was that monetary policy was formulated outside the framework of democracy. The states in Europe have done to their own people what the Washington Consensus did to African peoples in the 1980s. Unelected governments rule Europe; the EU ruling phalanx is not accountable to anyone.

Here is my point: The antidote to the market was never the state but democracy. Not the state but a democratic political order has contained the worst fallout from capitalism over the last few centuries. The real custodian of a democratic order was never the state but society. The question we are facing today is not just that of market failure but of an all-round political failure: the financialization of capitalism is leading to the collapse of the democratic order. The problem was best defined by the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US: it is the 99% against the 1%.

It would be a shame if this audience is to walk away from Professor Stiglitz’s lecture with a message that the problem is just one of “market failure” and the solution is a robust state that regulates markets and provides development finance. Is the lesson of the Structural Adjustment era simply that we need strong states to defend ourselves from the Washington Consensus? Or does the experience of the SAP era also raise a second question: What happens if developing countries are forced to push open their markets before they have stable, democratic institutions to protect their citizens? Should we be surprised that the result is something worse than crony capitalism, worse than private corruption, whereby those in the state use their positions to privatize social resources and stifle societal opposition?

Sadly, this ruling is not a fluke. Two weeks ago, the WTO ruled that U.S. "dolphin-safe" tuna labels, which allows consumers to choose tuna caught without dolphin-killing fishing practices, were also a "technical barrier to trade" that must be eliminated or weakened.