If you think it odd that I might suggest a connection between the failure of World Trade Organisation talks in Mexico this month and Bertrand Cantat, the French rock singer accused of murdering his actress wife, read on.

His wife was Marie Trintignant, one of France's most recognisable actresses. She was known for her portrayals of flawed women - of prostitutes and thieves, alcoholics and liars, women who fail to master their emotions and their lives.

Cantat, lead singer of the rock group 'Noir D?sir', struck his wife and killed her in a drunken rage, apparently because she insisted on trying to keep up good relations with her three previous husbands, the fathers of her four children.

Cantat is thought of in France as an intellectual, but the commentator Theodore Dalrymple has a different view, expressed with his usual eloquence in The New Criterionthis month:

"Cantat's opinions were, of course, depressingly banal and unoriginal. They hardly need to be enumerated, so predictable were they… "His view of virtue was that of modern man: it is more a question of expressing the right views than of submitting to the discipline of good behaviour. Armed with the right views, therefore, a man can do no wrong, and the more vehemently he expresses them, or the more successfully he disseminates them, the better man he is."

Isn't that a good paragraph? It catches perfectly a condition that desperately needs being put under a microscope and held there, kicking and screaming, until the world sees it for what it is - the condition of people who arrive at their views by way of a kind of faith, not reason. These are people who are for something, not so much because it makes good sense as because they feel it is correct to be associated with it. They are people whose views are acquired and worn in the same way clothes are acquired and worn. They are people to whom views other than their own are like clothes in which they wouldn't be caught dead.

But let's leave that for a moment, and focus on the World Trade Organisation: It is one of those organisations about which few people are curious. Even its name seems uninviting. It is likely that all most people remember of the events in Cancun, Mexico, earlier this month is that the meeting failed to reach any agreement.

In fact, like many international organisations, the WTO has a noble purpose. Its object is to promote free trade by persuading countries to abolish import tariffs and other barriers. What that promises to do is allow poor countries to compete globally in manufacturing, or agriculture, say, without having the deck stacked against them by trade barriers of one type or another, erected by richer countries. It has 146 members, so it is quite a large organisation.

It is easy to understand and sympathise with its purpose, but moving the world from here to there is not easy. There are, as you might suspect, good reasons for trade barriers. Some of them have to do with levelling playing fields close to home - it is estimated, for example, that on average every US cotton farmer gets an annual subsidy of $100,000, which costs the US taxpayer around $2 billion every year. This subsidy is designed to keep US cotton farmers in business in the American economy, but it also has the effect of encouraging an over-production of cotton, it depresses world prices of the commodity and keeps African cotton out of this lucrative market.

World trade is a Byzantine maze of such things, and negotiating towards free trade in the WTO is a slow, painstaking, endlessly frustrating business that only a bureaucrat could love.

The Cancun round of talks was meant to be all about the rich countries giving something up for the benefit of the developing world. The US and the EU, particularly, were going to reduce farm subsidies and let the poorer nations compete in their markets on fairer terms. That's what they said, anyway.

Some say that new, liberalised trade rules could have increased world income by $230 billion annually and, according to a recent study by the Center for Global Development, could have lifted 200 million of the poor in developing countries out of poverty.

When the talks collapsed, some immediately characterised the failure as the fault of the rich countries, yet again. Oxfam, for example, said the "agricultural subsidy superpowers refused to concede any ground to developing countries on agriculture."

Let's be polite and call that a superficial reading of what happened.

Those who looked a little deeper said it was because of something called the Singapore Issues. In truth, this little group of problems has not so much to do with trade, but more to do with the free movement of capital and investment.

Why would that have anything to do with the WTO? Before 1998, there existed something called the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, a sort of sister to the WTO that was meant to negotiate a multilateral agreement on investment. But the MAI folded in 1998, due to lack of support. The issues it was meant to address were never dealt with.

The story of those who say the Singapore Issues sunk the talks goes like this: As a result of pressure from the EU, Switzerland and Japan, the Singapore issues were put on the agenda at Cancun. India and Malaysia were dead set against tackling them. At the meeting, African nations decided they were against them as well. Tempers flared. And the United States was happy to let the Cancun meeting fall apart because they were not exactly wild about getting rid of agricultural subsidies.

At a certain level, that probably is the story of Cancun.

But there is an underlying, and ongoing process that had a greater effect. The real story of what happened… is still happening… to the WTO lies elsewhere, much closer to our friend M Cantat's European home, closer to the marketplace of ideas where he acquired his intellectual duds.

I mentioned earlier that Oxfam had made a comment on the failure of the talks. There were some 2,000 delegates at Cancun from the 146 nations that are members of the WTO. There were 3,000 others there from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), Oxfam being just one of them.

Their purpose is the same as it has been with a variety of other international bodies. They wish to use their ability to sit as observers in conferences like this to urge their own agenda on the people who must abide by the rules that are set.

Specifically, in this case, they want the WTO to allow trade to be restricted on the basis of political, rather than scientific judgements. Many of them are so-called Green environmental groups, which want environmental officials to have broad rights to protect the environment.

There is nothing to prevent such a thing being provided for in a specific international agreement, but the Green groups don't want that. They want to create a situation in which powerful countries, such as their friends in the EU, should be able to force other, weaker countries, to change their domestic environmental policies under threat of trade coercion.

The point of the WTO is to stop big countries playing politics with free trade. But the NGOs don't like that idea. The big countries are easy to lobby. Something like 140 smaller ones are much more difficult to lobby, and anyway, the developing countries and the NGOs are far from being in bed together.

Developing countries understand that the best and fastest route to a better environment is through economic prosperity. The NGOs don't want to wait until developing countries have time to prosper, so they want cripplingly expensive rules and regulations imposed on the developing countries straight away, and whether they like it or not.

Alan Oxley is the highly-respected former Australian Ambassador to GATT, the General Agreement on Tarriffs and Trade, the body that is the WTO's predecessor. He released a booklet (available on the net) entitled 'European Unilateralism: Environmental Trade Barriers and the Rising Threat to Prosperity Through Trade' as the WTO meeting was convened in Cancun.

The subject of his booklet is suggested by its title. In it, he documents some 40 environmental restrictions on free trade, most of them passed recently by the EU, and all of which, he says, "disregard the rights of the WTO".

No one will be shocked by that. The EU has been playing that kind of game for as long as the Greens have.

For example, the EU prohibited the use of six different growth hormones in beef in 1988. The US and Canada protested, and nine years later (!) a WTO panel ruled that the EU's action was wrong, because it was not based on sound science. Three of the hormones are natural, to the extent that it is impossible to tell whether an animal has ever been treated with them. Moreover, even as it banned the import of US beef treated with any of those six hormones, the EU allowed European farmers to treat cows with the same hormones. To this day, and despite the WTO ruling, the EU continues its ban.

Don't bother us with the facts, the EU seems to be saying, because we are the ethical ones… we wear the correct clothing and you don't.

For their part, Greens have managed to establish officially that the facts are beside the point in the so-called Cartagena Protocol, which is the first legally binding agreement on the trans-national movement of living modified organisms, such as seeds and animals. It came into effect as the WTO was meeting. The aim of this Protocol is to ensure "an adequate level of safety in the transfer, handling and use of LMOs". Sounds fair enough.

However, through a reference in its preamble to a Declaration made at the Earth Summit in Rio, this document gives life to what has become known as the Precautionary Principle: "Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."

This is the Holy Grail of Greendom - something that will allow them to impose their convictions on the rest of the world, whether it wants to adopt them or not, whether the facts support them or not, and without regard for the effect it has on the progress of developing nations. Oh, and they wouldn't mind if they stopped globalisation in its tracks, either.

How was it Mr Dalrymple put it? Armed with the right views, therefore, a man can do no wrong, and the more vehemently he expresses them, or the more successfully he disseminates them, the better man he is.