For a much more extensive report on why the Doha Round talks collapsed, with numerous links to other sources, go here.  According to this article, food was not the only hot issue for developing nations.  West African nations made a strong push to get rid of subsidies to US cotton growers.  The idea of "food sovereignty" was further expanded in one initiative to include health care, education, water, telecommunications, and energy, all of which were described as human rights over which a nation could not properly surrender control. 

Some developing nations were angry that the developed world would not permit them to provide tariff protections to local industries during their getting-established phase--a tactic they pointed out had been heavily relied on by the USA and others during their industrialization phases.  Negotiators were also foreseeing that effective solutions to global climate change and the current financial crisis may clash with WTO prohibitions. 

Underlying all this was the perception that the promised benefits of free trade, structural realignment, and globalization had not arrived in the developing world, and that current projections of benefits are now much more modest than the halcyon projections of yesteryear.  Many other issues are also covered in the article, which I highly recommend. 

Australia and Brazil were among nations that were hoping to use the Doha round to reduce or eliminate US susidies to farmers, and they are trying to revive the negotiations. 

US family farmers' elation at death of Doha round is reported here. 

Researchers at Oregon State University, UCLA, and Macalester College studied four African nations and found perverse effects of trade liberalization:

Despite good intentions, the push to privatize government functions and insistence upon "free trade" that is too often unfair has caused declining food production, increased poverty and a hunger crisis for millions of people in many African nations, researchers conclude in a new study.

The quotation is the lede in the press release announcing publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Indigienous farmers are not efficient, but they can maintain their families and communities. When exposed to highly-efficient and sometimes subsidized Western agricultural, they are driven out of business and are not able to find alternative employment. 

I reported here that NAFTA destroyed 1.7 million farming jobs in Mexico and that some Andean farmers have been driven by import competition to grow cocoa for illegal drugs. 

Christine sent me a link to The WTO has failed developing nations in The Guardian.  It discusses ten examples of ways in which WTO has failed the poor: subsidies to cotton growers in developed nations, other agricultural subsidies in the rich world working hardship on developing world producers, ambiguous procedural rules for trade agreements favor sophisticated nations, failure to complete work on 88 special treatment rules for developing nations, slow-walking resolution of the tension between intellectual property protection and affordable medicines in the developing world, legal costs of WTO proceedings are so great that complaints by African nations are impractical, new protectionist economic policies in the G20 following the GFC, glacial decision-making to alter trade rules to alleviate natural disasters, minor developing nation influence on WTO decision-making, and 10 years of failure in the Doha round to make trade fair in the eyes of developing nations.