After six decades of ever-expanding international commerce, the high tide of free trade is

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As tens of thousands of South Koreans protest US beef imports, rising commodity prices push nations to keep more food for domestic consumption and the US chooses a new president who might be less supportive of free trade than his immediate predecessors, the world may be facing the end of a cycle that began in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

The liberalisation of global trade has come “to a screeching halt,” said Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It'll take years to rebuild the foundations of free-trade policy.” The cause is more political than economic. “This is a challenging time to be in the pro-trade wing of any party in virtually any country,” US trade representative Susan Schwab said at the US Chamber of Commerce. “It's hard to be for open trade, whether you are in India or the European Union or in China.”

Fuelling the backlash is a convergence of trade-related anxieties: national-security concerns, worries about food safety and sufficiency, the desire to protect local jobs and the environment. In addition, the benefits of trade are often widely dispersed —think low prices at Wal-Mart —and entail high adjustment costs, including the loss of manufacturing jobs. The modern era of trade dates to the late 1940s, when the US and United Kingdom pushed for the establishment of a global organisation to avoid the beggar-thy-neighbour policies often blamed for exacerbating the Great Depression. The general agreement on tariffs and trade, established in 1948, succeeded in cutting industrial duties in developed countries from an average of 40 per cent to about 4 per cent over six decades.

Now known as the World Trade Organisation, it is stuck in negotiations that began in 2001 over US and European agricultural subsidies. The Doha Round, as the talks are called, has also been held up by disagreements between rich and poor countries about how much to reduce import taxes.

“The Doha Round isn't dead yet, but it's being pushed around a nursing home,” said Doug Goudie, director for international trade at the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington.

European Union trade negotiators expressed concern this week about “a re-emergence of protectionist sentiment in the US” after Congress approved a new $289 billion farm bill that extends price supports and other subsidies developing nations oppose.

—Bloomberg