Barely three months after the failure of the Cancun ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), African countries are preparing to go back into the ring with the economic superpowers.
Bickering over competition and cross-border investment brought the September ministerial meeting in Mexico to its knees. The developed and developing nations were deadlocked over farm subsidies paid by wealthy nations and the imposition of agricultural subsidies that block access to their markets.
South Africa was among a dozen African countries that met in Cairo last week to renew the fight.
”Participants called for a resumption of multilateral negotiations under the aegis of the WTO,” Egyptian Foreign Trade Minister Youssef Boutros Ghali said at the start of the two-day summit.
”African countries reiterated their commitment to the agenda of the Doha talks, which marks a real opportunity for African countries to increase the volume of their contribution to international commerce, and at the same time consolidate their development objectives,” he said.
The African states insist that the Doha round, which gives priority to gaining access to developed markets for developing countries, must be implemented. With the next ministerial meeting less than a month away, the entire WTO system remains in peril.
The developing countries may have exposed the desire to lower trade barriers as nothing more than cant. But this is hardly the victory that they proclaimed, say economists who maintain the collapse of the regulatory system will leave the world worse off with the real suffering being visited on the very poor.
Uncontrolled multilateral trading can only work to the advantage of the developed countries. For all its faults, the 148-member WTO is all that stands in the way of this.
This eight-year-old successor to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs signed in 1947 is the place where developing world grievances and problems can be given full weight.
The Doha round was supposed to be completed by the end of next year. Now completion by the end of 2005 seems hardly possible. Optimists point out that the previous Uruguay round took eight years to complete — five years longer than originally intended.
But the game has changed significantly since the collapse of the Seattle talks in 1999.
The developing countries have taken a more confrontational stance — determined to expose the imbalances and unfairness in the system even if it destroys the system.
They maintain they have the confidence not to accept an agreement that does not meet their needs. While it was undoubtedly the hypocrisy and intransigence of the developed countries that put the brakes on Cancun the poor countries must also take a share of the blame for wrecking the conference.
They were unwilling to compromise — not even on their own trade barriers.
More than half of the planned benefits from the Doha round will come from developing countries lifting the barriers against one another.
The developed countries appeared to consider the will of their activist lobby above that of their own poor people.
Western diplomats were thus watching the Cairo meeting closely for signs of a willingness among Africans, at least, to be ready to talk business rather than merely score points.