Last updated 0100 Hrs IST, Friday, November 9, 2001
WTO SUMMIT A last hurrah? The greatest obstacle to trade liberalisation will be the global economy itself, which is contracting, writes Walden Bello Desperate is the word to describe the antics of the trade superpowers on the eve of the fourth ministerial of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Doha, Qatar. Most developing countries want the ministerial to focus on the implementation of commitments made under the Uruguay Round. They have been groaning under the weight of implementing the 28 sub-agreements that comprised the Uruguay Round agreement, while the big trading powers have refused or been slow to implement their commitments to provide greater market access in agriculture and textiles to developing countries or cut the massive subsidisation of agricultural interests. The European Union and the United States have put aside some of their differences - temporarily - to present a common front for a new round of negotiations that would focus on the so-called "new issues" of investment, competition policy, government procurement, and trade facilitation - essentially the same issues that formed their common agenda before the disastrous ministerial in December 1999. Learning from Seattle, the EU and US have de-emphasised their disagreement on agricultural trade issues, and the US, apparently, does not intend to make the linkage between trade and labour standards - a key point of conflict at Seattle - an issue in Doha. The proposed draft declaration for the ministerial is an example of the sort of underhand tactics that Doha the big trading powers are resorting to. Proponents of the document say it is "balanced". The problem, however, lies in nuance. According to Aileen Kwa, a Geneva-based analyst who monitors the WTO for Focus on the Global South, the draft does not emphasise the majority of WTO members' position on implementation issues, the "Special and Differential Treatment'' of developing countries, greater access to developed country markets, and reviews of the agreements on Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMs), Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), and services (GATS). The draft was a product of consultations among an inner circle of 20 to 25 participants, the so-called Green Room process that effectively excludes most members of the WTO. In the lead-up to Qatar, this exclusive process has already held two "mini-ministerials'', one in Mexico at the end of August and another in Singapore on October 13-14. The developing countries' disaffection with the Green Room process was one reason the third ministerial collapsed in 1999. At that time, Charlene Barshefsky, then US trade representative, admitted that the WTO decision-making process was non-transparent and inequitable. All that was forgotten as the developed countries realised that in the WTO, where the developing countries are in the majority, the big powers can only dominate through such non-democratic mechanisms as the Green Room and the so-called Consensus System. Two months after Seattle, Mike Moore, WTO director general, told developing countries at the UNCTAD X gathering in Bangkok in February 2000 that the Green Room/Consensus System was "non-negotiable''. The smoke had not yet cleared from the World Trade Center in New York before US trade representative Robert Zoellick seized on the tragedy to press for greater trade liberalisation via the WTO and other mechanisms, asserting that free trade was a way to counter terrorism. The greatest obstacle to trade liberalisation will not be opposition on the part of developing countries but the global economy itself, which is contracting, thanks to the accelerated interlocking of economies brought about by globalisation. In both developed and developing countries, pressures to save domestic industries, focus on domestic-demand-led growth, and countering the frailties of export-led economies at a time of recession will stymie any movement towards more liberalisation. The fourth ministerial may well be the WTO's last hurrah and the project of radical economic globalisation of which it was the crown jewel. (Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global South, a research programme based in Bangkok, and professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines)
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