I am glad that my taxes are going to help those who are recently unemployed, who are ill, or who are permanently disabled in some way. I am also proud to live in a country that will pay a solo mother to look after and raise her child. That child is the future of New Zealand. My country, my people, my future. I want to invest in her/him. I don’t let any judgements I may have about the parents, both mother and father, cloud my concern for the welfare of that kid.

Where do many of these beneficiaries come from? Most are falling off the bottom of our low wage economy. Foodbanks across the country are apealling – no, begging, for more donations as requests at foodbanks soar. The Council of Christian Social Services (NZCSS) issued a report yesterday calling for Working for Families (WFF) to be extended to support all low-income people, including beneficiaries and single people without children. Where have I heard that before? Oh, right. It’s been Green Party policy since WFF was invented. We said then and still assert that many of the most vulnerable had been left behind. Labour wouldn’t listen. I guess that those folks don’t vote Labour. The NZCSS also called for a linking of benefits to food prices rather than the CPI – another Green policy.

The crisis that is quietly unfolding is reported in the back pages of today’s weekend Herald, page A10. This should be front page news. Hardworking families – we are talking about people with jobs here – unable to feed themselves on what they earn. The NZCSS survey found that housing costs now eat up from 30-50 percent of net incomes for the majority of clients at the four foodbanks surveyed. Some working families still cannot make ends meet even when they get a bit of help from WINZ.

Like the slow inexorable collapse of the finance industry here in NZ, the conditions faced by our poorest citizens is slowly going from bad to worse. We are standing quietly by as spectators while our middle class savings are wiped out and while our less well off neighbours begin to starve. Shouldn’t we be doing something now, before these trends overwhelm our ability to cope?

“There is no use beating around the bush, this meeting has collapsed, members have simply not been able to bridge their differences,” the World Trade Organization’s Director-General Pascal Lamy told journalists.

And the reason being given for the collapse of this seven year long set of trade negotiaions is India and the USA’s failure to reach an agreement on an SSM or special safeguard mechanism that allows countries to raise tariffs to protect their farmers from a surge in imports. But according to the Age it may be more complicated than that.

India and other developing countries wanted the mechanism to kick in at a lower import surge level than has been proposed in order to protect their millions of poor farmers from starvation.

Others wanted it to take effect at a higher rate so as not to hurt exporters.

Sources said after Tuesday’s breakdown that the United States was stalling for time to avoid a rift over another sticking point, cotton subsidies.

“The US cannot afford to give way on cotton, so it does not even want to go into the issue on cotton,” an Asian diplomat told AFP.

“It knows that India would not give ground on SSMs, in which case India would be blamed in case of any collapse.”

Radio New Zealand reported this morning that another part of the problem was the wealthier industrialised countries continual push to open up the services sector to private investment.

While most people can see the logic in putting a fair transparent set of rules around the international trade of goods, the services sector is far more tricky.  Countries like New Zealand, that have pushed had and fast on services as though they are nothing more than trinkets to be bought and sold, rather than integral components of communities’ public infrastructure (for instance, water, power, education, health care and waste management) have failed the WTO.

Their (our) desire to push the WTO along at breakneck speed – if you can describe anything that happens in the WTO as happening at breakneck speed – has undermined its credibility in the international arena and made it impossible for countries to respond with anything but very protectionist negotiating strategies.

This collapse should be as good a sign as any that the current ‘business first, community and democracy distant second’ model for the WTO is flawed and needs a serious overhaul.  This is important because the alternative to the WTO could well be a range of even less democratic bilateral and multilateral deals such as the New Zealand-China preferential trade agreement.