JUST LISTEN TO him floundering. The big ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation to be held here in December is under threat of falling apart and Mr Tsang faces the acute embarrassment of a party host whose guests either do not show up or who spend the evening fighting each other.

His solution was to meet the British consul-general in Hong Kong, Stephen Bradley, and the head of the European Commission's office in Hong Kong, David Ting.

I was obviously not party to the ensuing conversation but I can guess at its general tone. The three of them spent their time bemoaning the latest deadlock and pledging to seek greater co-operation. This will have about as much effect as if you and I did it. Minnows may grow to become bigger fish but these three people are still minnows in the scale of things.

The background here is that there was once an international body called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt). It met regularly to discuss tariff reduction and in 1994 achieved significant successes at something called the Uruguay Round.

It then developed ambitions to bigger things, transformed itself into the World Trade Organisation and has mostly encountered frustration and militant protesters since that time, although the press releases will tell you otherwise.

But our government wants to make Hong Kong a 'world class city' and takes the view that hosting a WTO ministerial meeting could help it achieve whatever ill-defined objective this advertising slogan implies.

Only six years ago Seattle tried to do the same and all that a WTO meeting gave it was pictures that went round the world of policemen tackling rioters on the heavily littered streets of the city.

Fortunately for Seattle, its claim to world class actually rests on being the home of such world-renowned corporate names as Boeing, Microsoft and Starbucks. It will not try making its name on the WTO again.

But it is not rioters who threaten Hong Kong's association with the WTO. Police arrangements are well in hand for dealing with rioters, so well in hand that a good slice of our economy must shut itself down for several days during the meeting in order to accommodate anti-riot measures.

The threat in our case is France. Tariff reduction talks have finally come face to face with the big giant, the European Union's common agricultural policy, French and German farmers in other words, and particularly French ones.

They have created enormous walls around themselves to protect outrageous subsidies and import barriers which they have enjoyed as their price for supporting the formation of the EU and they swing considerable political clout.

The United States has now attempted to breach these walls ahead of the WTO meeting here with a proposal to slash its own farm subsidies by 60 per cent but only if the EU joins the party.

France fiercely resists, however, so much so that two days ago you may have noticed an opinion piece in this newspaper by former WTO director-general Mike Moore who said that while he was previously 'cautiously optimistic' about the success of the Hong Kong meeting, he is now 'cautiously pessimistic'.

The thing to note about these big WTO talk shops is that the real work of reaching agreement comes before they are held and the actual meetings do little more than formalise and bless the results of backroom negotiations.

If there is no agreement before the meetings, then there is no real point in holding them. They will still be held, of course, as not to do so would be an admission of outright failure and diplomats countenance no such thing outside declarations of war.

Thus Mr Tsang will probably still get his festivities and the rest of us enormous interruptions of our daily lives. But if France does not make sufficient concession, he will also get headlines across the world that say 'Hong Kong sinks' or 'Hong Kong fails' or 'Hong Kong a fiasco'. I wonder if he is quite sure that this is what he wants.

My guess is that France will make a last-minute concession, one in name but not in fact, and other WTO members will accept it rather than risk the sinks and fails alternative. French farm subsidies will remain intact.

But high-level international talks are not my forte. I find them worthwhile only in that I rely on television reports of them to send me to sleep at night. Take your own view of the outcome. All I can say is that we are not likely to lose much if this meeting does not come off.