UNCTAD

[Patrick Bond]

I'll unite with Hank on this. I attended the 1996 Unctad meetings in 
the Johannesburg suburb of Midrand, which was presided over by our 
Minister of Trade and Industry, Alec Erwin, a leading member of the 
SA Communist Party and former lead Congress of SA Trade Unions 
strategist. Alec couldn't get anything vaguely progressive together, 
and the delegates there fell over themselves saying they'd promoted 
neo-liberalism in their neighbourhood better than the other guys. 
Nothing much happened, in the meantime, to give any credence to 
periodic SA claims that we are helping organise a new South front 
against the North. Then Alec (still president of Unctad) went to 
Singapore for the WTO meeting late last year and agreed to place MIA 
agreements onto the Unctad "table" which sets it down the slippery 
slope (he could have done some other maneuvres on this, but as 
always, he sought conciliatory ground with the West). (Last month SA 
announced it would lead the world campaign for liberalisation of 
agricultural trade, through the Cairns Group.) On the other hand, 
Alec seemed to endorse a post-Keynesian industrial economists' 
grouping within Unctad promoting the E.Asian flock-of-geese analogy 
(based on product cycle theory) for Southern Africa; but that was the 
one slight hint of heretical thinking, and its practical application 
will be to entrench SA conglomerate control over our region.

If Unctad is the best Chris can come up with on UN agencies agin' 
neo-liberalism, case is closed. The UNDP parades around South Africa 
in neo-liberalism-plus-human-face drag, which in some ways is even 
more pernicious than fighting the real thing.


> From:          "Hank Sims" <sims at mail.cwia.com>
> To:            lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Date:          Sat, 23 May 1998 10:02:41 +0000
> Subject:       UNCTAD
> Reply-to:      lbo-talk at lists.panix.com


> 
> Chris Buford wrote:
> 
> >Is that not so that UNCTAD may be more of a focus for 
> >anti-neo-liberal third worldist perspectives than the Security 
> >Council?
> 
>      Not necessarily so.  UNCTAD has been reforming itself with great 
> speed of late, as US proposals for UN reform have been calling for 
> its dissolution.  The US and the International Chamber of Commerce, 
> remember, was able to axe the widely respected UN Center on 
> Transnational Corporations a few years ago; the heat is on UNCTAD, 
> now, to reform or perish.
>      Much of what UNCTAD does these days is done /in cooperation/ 
> with the ICC: together, they are putting out a series of studies on 
> the business climates of least-developed countries.  When Asia went 
> bust, the ICC and UNCTAD published a boosterish report showing that 
> "investor confidence" in the region "was still high."  At the lastest 
> meeting of the Basel Convention, UNCTAD and ICC spokesmen together 
> condemned aspects of the agreement (designed to prohibit the export 
> of hazardous waste from developed to developing countries) and 
> succeeded in weaking the Convention.
>      Also: UNCTAD has forged several new partnerships (with the WTO, 
> the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and the 
> United Nations Development Programme) that will advise the 
> governments of LDCs on how to attract by rewriting their regulations 
> (bringing them in line with the global business climate).
>      In short, we're a long way from the NIEO.  UNCTAD did some 
> modest work in Africa last month by helping the continent's countries 
> to formulate a united agenda for this month's WTO minesterial 
> meeting.  They've also been lending some support to OPEC nations
> in their bid to prop up oil prices.  But a large part of UNCTAD 
> now serves as bridesmaid for global capital and the Third World.  The 
> power brought to bear on it by the US and the Annan secretariat 
> pretty much guarantees that its reformism will be directed mostly at 
> the LDCs, rather than the economic order.
>      By the way, UNCTAD had promoted the Tobin tax, until Jesse Helms 
> and his colleagues passed a budget rider that prohibited payment to 
> any international organization studying any sort of international 
> taxation.  So that potato was dropped.
>      Not to give anything to the Security Council, though.
> 
>      Hank Sims      
> 
>