The negotiations on global commerce that began in the capital of Qatar in 2001 are heading for the mortuary, pending a last-minute miracle before the end of this year.

That's a crucial deadline.

If George W. Bush can take the deal to the U.S. Congress before he loses his trade promotion authority in June 2007, lawmakers can either accept or reject it.

Any accord reached afterwards will be subject to congressional modifications, reducing the chances of a global agreement to zero.

A last-ditch attempt to set rules for cutting industrial tariffs and agricultural subsidies ended in a stalemate on July 1, dashing hopes of an accord only months after 149 governments said in Hong Kong that they had the outline of a deal.

The breakdown of the negotiations -- the first such failure since the 1930s, as C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics, has noted -- is bad news for Asia, and not because a great opportunity to open protected Western markets is being squandered.

The concessions offered by the U.S. and the European Union were so insincere that a deal on these terms would have hardly made a difference to farmers and workers in Asia.

The much-touted end to developed-country subsidies on farm exports by 2013 would have removed $5 billion from the table, largely leaving intact the $80 billion in maximum trade- distorting domestic handouts to farmers on which a deal still eludes, say IIE economists Gary Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott. And what about the grand plan to do away with tariffs and quotas on 97 percent of the goods exported by least-developed nations?

Real gains for the world's poorest countries will have to come from the remaining 3 percent, which include sugar, clothing, leather goods and ceramics, the IIE researchers say.

The big risk to Asia from a collapse of trade talks is that it is bound to lead to a proliferation of free-trade agreements, or FTAs. In some of them, Asian nations will participate, in the process making larger concessions than they would have under an accord reached by global consensus.

They will be excluded from certain other FTAs, most notably the Atlantic Area of Prosperity proposed by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. This would combine the EU and the U.S. in a trading bloc. Why should Vietnam, which is about to become a member of the World Trade Organization, or Cambodia and Nepal, which joined in 2004, open their economies to U.S. and European industry, end subsidies to their fledgling exporters and bear other costs for joining a worldwide community when the real gains from free trade will be enjoyed by a small, exclusive coterie?

Aznar says concerns that a U.S.-EU trade agreement would become a rich man's club are baseless. According to him, such an arrangement has another justification.

"Unless the U.S. and EU agree on common standards, which would immediately be accepted by the world, the two risk being leapfrogged by such rising stars as China or India who might instead set the global benchmarks," Aznar wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal. From an Asian perspective, this motivation for a U.S.-EU FTA smacks of clubbiness. Why must developed nations always be the standard setters?

Standards on safety, health, hygiene, packaging, labor, human rights and the environment are, by definition, anti-free trade.

Some of these standards, such as banning imports of products that use prison labor, have come to enjoy universal legitimacy.

The desirability of certain other benchmarks, such as those pertaining to use of child labor, is more dubious.

In its bilateral FTAs, the U.S. has won commitments from trading partners that they would strive to adhere to the International Labor Organization's core standards, including the "no child labor" norm, even when developing countries have prevented the WTO from adopting ILO benchmarks, notes Robert Baldwin, an economist at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Are developing countries exploiting labor? Not really, if you consider the harsh reality that a ban on imports of carpets made with child labor will probably do nothing for the welfare of minors in poor countries. It will only push them into non- tradable services such as washing utensils in cafes, or worse.

Certain other standards, such as limits on pesticide residue in food products, are arbitrary and discriminate against primary producers in poor countries.

Saving the Doha round, which will represent 99 percent of world imports when Russia and Ukraine are included in the WTO, will have much greater benefits for the global economy than adding to what's already a plethora of preferential agreements.

There was just such a surge of institutionalized favoritism in global trade in the 1930s: The British preferred to import at zero duty from other members of the Commonwealth; Germany was the main trading partner of every country in east and central Europe in 1937.

Japan had similar arrangements with its Asian colonies. We all know how that decade ended.