----- Forwarded message from Adam Ma'anit <ashaman@xs4all.nl> -----
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 11:47:13 +0200
Subject: [StopWTORound] Developing states resist calls for new trade talks
From: Bangkok Post
March 27, 2001
Developing states resist calls for new trade talks
The WTO is holding a seminar in Chiang Mai today and tomorrow
on trade and development for Asian governments.
Walden Bello
The World Trade Organisation is taking a low profile with its two-
day seminar on trade and development for Asian governments in
Chiang Mai starting today.
This is not surprising. For while trade and the environment make up
the formal agenda of the meeting, the informal agenda is to press
Asian governments to commit to a new trade talks at the WTO
ministerial meeting in Qatar in November.
This is typical WTO: Use every key inter-governmental meeting to
get governments to fall into line behind a new trade round. The
WTO did this at the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in
Brunei last November. It did it again at an African leaders summit
several weeks ago.
As well as twisting the arms of Asian governments to support a
new round of talks, the WTO is attempting to get backing for a new
round from Asian civil society.
The WTO knows that even if the governments fall into line in Chiang
Mai, civil society opposition at home could still push them off the
bandwagon. Thus we have a trade and environment seminar for civil
society organisations-in Chiang Mai on March 29 and 30-fronted for
the WTO by the Geneva-based International Centre for Trade and
Sustainable Development.
Most developing countries are opposed to a new trade round. They
have not yet absorbed the demands on them made at the Uruguay
Round.
Many countries have still not changed their domestic legislation to
make them WTO-consistent. They are bitter that many lost rather
than gained from the Uruguay Round.
The United Nations Development Programme estimates that under
the WTO regime, in the period 1995 to 2004, the 48 least
developed countries will actually be worse off by $600 million (26.6
billion baht) a year, with sub-Saharan Africa actually worse off by
$1.2 billion (53.2 billion baht).
The UN Development Programme also says that 70% of the gains
of the Uruguay Round will go to developed countries, with most of
the rest going to a relatively few large export-oriented developing
countries.
Mike Moore, the WTO director-general, and Clare Short, Britain's
development minister, have tried to sell a new round as a
development round. But the reality is that the main agenda for
liberalisation has more to do with opening up their economies to
greater penetration by northern transnational corporations.
The "new issues" that the developed countries want to make the
centrepiece of negotiations are investment policy, competition
policy, government procurement policy, labour standards and
environmental standards.
The object of the first three is to give transnational corporations
national treatment-that is, to strike down preferential treatment
given to local producers and contractors. As for labour and
environmental clauses in WTO agreements, developing countries
fear that their intent is simply to serve as barriers to the entry of
developing country imports while many southern NGOs regard
them as giving the WTO tremendous power in areas where it does
not have competence.
A new round is like a Pandora's box. Once you open it, all sorts of
issues detrimental to the interests of peoples and countries may
emerge. The United States may even use it to force other
economies to accept genetically modified organisms.
Instead of engaging in a new round of trade liberalisation, the WTO
should spend the next few years repairing the Uruguay Round so
that it does less harm to the interests of developing countries.
Here are a number of priority issues:
- Trade-related intellectual property rights should be revised
so as to ban the patenting of all life forms including
micro-organisms and to strengthen intellectual property systems
to protect the accumulated knowledge of local and indigenous
communities from bio-piracy.
- The Agreement on Agriculture should be amended radically to
eliminate tariff peaks and tariff escalation against southern
agricultural exports, end the massive subsidies for developed
country farming interests, do away with the different forms of
direct income support for developed country farming interests,
institute a food security exception to market access rules, and
recognise the principle of special and differential treatment
for developing countries that would allow them greater latitude
in their interpretation and implementation of Agreement on
Agriculture rules.
- The Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures must be
revised to drop the ban on local content policies. Trade policy
has traditionally been a mechanism used by developing countries
to industrialise. The ban on local-content policies, which
specifies that a determined amount of a product be sourced
locally instead of being imported, practically eliminates this
positive use of trade policy for development.
- The special ministerial decision approved in Marrakesh in 1994
to provide assistance to net food importing developing countries
still has not been implemented in spite of the fact that the
Agreement on Agriculture has raised the price of these
countries' food imports.
- The WTO must force developed countries to live up to the
commitments they made to lift import barriers under the
Agreement on Textiles and Clothing. Seven years into the WTO,
the United States, European Union and other developed countries
have scarcely lifted their quotas against Third World garment
and textile imports. For all intents and purposes, the
restrictive multi-fibre agreements remain in place.
- Last but not least, the WTO decision-making structure must be
overhauled. The "Green Room/consensus process" has ensured that
a few countries dominate decision-making at the WTO. Even
Charlene Barshefsky, the US Trade Representative during the 1999
Seattle summit, acknowledged that the WTO was undemocratic.
"The process was a rather exclusionary one," she said. "All
meetings were held between 20 and 30 key countries. That meant
100 countries, 100, were never in the room. This led to the
extraordinarily bad feeling that they were left out of the process and
that the results had been dictated to them by the 25 or 30
privileged countries in the room."
After the developing countries rebelled against this exclusionary
decision-making process in Seattle, Stephen Byers, the British
minister of trade and industry, said: "The WTO will not be able to
continue in its present form. There has to be fundamental and
radical change in order for it to meet the needs and aspirations of
all 134 of its members."
Yet scarcely three months, during UN Conference on Trade and
Development (Unctad) in Bangkok in February 2000, Mike Moore
said the Green Room/consensus process was non-negotiable.
Decision-making is fundamental. The developing countries and
international civil society cannot agree to a new trade round unless
the inequity in decision-making is banished from the WTO.
When the WTO came into being in 1995, free trade was seen as a
panacea, a cure for poverty, inequality and almost everything else.
The Washington Consensus that formed the intellectual pillar of
free trade and structural adjustment seemed to carry all before it.
Today, the situation is radically different. The alleged benefits of
free trade and free markets are challenged everywhere.
As for the so-called positive relationship between free trade and
growth, the emerging consensus is laid out by Dani Rodrik,
professor in international political economics at Harvard University:
"Do lower trade barriers spur greater economic progress? The
available studies reveal no systematic relationship between a
country's average level of tariff and non-tariff barriers and its
subsequent economic growth. If anything, the evidence for the
1990s indicates a positive relationship between import tariffs and
economic growth. The only clear pattern is that countries dismantle
their trade restrictions as they grow richer." This finding explains
why today's rich countries, with few exceptions, embarked on
modern economic growth behind protective barriers but now display
low trade barriers.
- Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global South,
a research, analysis and policy programme of Chulalongkorn
University's Social Research Institute. He is also a professor of
sociology and public administration at the University of the
Philippines.
----- End forwarded message -----
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