It is widely acknowledged that the developed world could do more to open up its economies to trade. Its failure to dismantle fully tariff barriers has hurt its economies as well as those of poor countries. The West should match their rhetoric with concrete action.
But the complaints of rich-country protectionism from the developing world - not to mention the criticisms of anti-free-trade pressure groups - has distorted the debate. In particular, four fallacies threaten the formation of good trade policy in the poorest countries.
The first is that rich-country protectionism is greater than poor-country protectionism and that this reflects how unfair and asymmetrical the world's trading system is. The argument is meant to add poignancy to frequent complaints by poor countries that the Uruguay Round was also "unfair" in having drawn more concessions from poor countries than from rich ones.
In fact, poor countries continue to have higher trade barriers than rich countries. For manufactured goods, for example, rich-country tariffs are 8 per cent on average, compared with 21 per cent for the poor countries.
The fallacy also breeds misconceptions about non-tariff barriers such as anti-dumping procedures. Here, poor countries are catching up with rich country excesses; between 1995 and 1999 they began 558 procedures compared with 463 by rich countries. It is therefore wrong to say trade barriers are asymmetrically stacked against the poor countries. Indeed, the opposite is true.
The second fallacy is that trade barriers against the poor countries reflect rich countries' wickedness or hypocrisy. This argument is supported by those who focus on rich countries' protectionism while failing to recognise poor countries' protectionism.
The sorry presence of protection against labour-intensive goods, mostly exported by poor countries, is mainly because trade liberalisation has occurred largely in the context of reciprocal reductions of trade barriers. As long as poor countries received most-favoured-nation benefits under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and were exempted from making concessions because they were "underdeveloped", rich countries proceeded to make tariff reductions in sectors that served their own interest. Unsurprisingly, giving few concessions of their own, poor countries got little in return. If you want a free lunch, you can hardly expect a banquet.
The third fallacy is that it is wrong to ask poor countries to dismantle their trade barriers when these exist in rich countries. This is an elementary error of economics. As Joan Robinson, the economist, famously said: if your trading partner throws rocks into his harbour, that is no reason to throw rocks into your own. It may sound "fair" to do so but it is downright silly - and even harmful to oneself.
The last fallacy is that exports from poor countries fail to grow because of protection in rich countries. Although rich-country protectionism is rightly condemned, poor countries need to realise that their own protectionism is often the cause of their dismal export and economic performance.
Protection creates an anti-export bias because selling in home markets becomes more lucrative than exporting. The south-east Asian economies took measures to offset this anti-export trap either through free trade or via subsidy and exchange-rate policies. As a result, they restored the incentive to export and registered massive export performance. India, which faced virtually the same trade barriers abroad, did not and her exports stagnated.
Refuting these fallacies is simple. Even so, rich countries must open their markets to free trade - the question is how. Clearly, multilateral trade negotiations are an important tool, particularly with poor countries now trading concessions. Every effort must be made to launch the aborted Seattle Round at the next World Trade Organisation ministerial meeting in Qatar this November.
But it is also important to harness the energies of the powerful civil society groups to eliminate such protectionism. In particular, the influential liberal church groups, which have marched at Seattle and elsewhere, need to be converted and mobilised in this great cause. Surely one can expect church groups, of all activists, to favour policies that take the welfare of both domestic and far poorer foreign workers into account. This requires that church groups campaign to dismantle rich countries' protectionism while advocating adjustment and retraining programmes that are compatible with a humane concern for workers in rich countries.
Is it too much to expect that, just as the Jubilee 2000 movement triumphed where many exhortations to give debt relief had failed, we could now count on a church-led movement, a Jubilee 2010, to do the same for ending rich countries' protectionism?
Jagdish Bhagwati is professor of economics at Columbia University. Arvind Panagariya is professor of economics at the University of Maryland