Reports on the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial conference have increasingly focused on the expected failure of this meeting to achieve the necessary level of ”consensus” to prevent ”another Cancun”.
The way things are in the WTO and in the current Doha-round negotiations, however, another ”failure”, or the successful resistance by developing countries against the escalating demands of the major powers, is essential in the defence and promotion of their own needs and rights.
Both the European Union and the United States are manipulating their agricultural ”offers” to lever ”compensatory openings” for their exports. This includes access to the agricultural and food markets and the services sectors (through the General Agreement on Trade in Services), and potentially into industrial, manufacturing and mining, forestry and fisheries, and other natural resources sectors through the concurrent Non–Agricultural Market Access negotiations.
Such expanded market liberalisation will reinforce the dominance of the stronger economies and their companies. But these emphases are diverting energies away from the main focus of what has been agreed should be a ”development” round. Over the years the developing countries have identified dozens of inequities, inconsistencies and lacunae in the Uruguay-round agreements, created through the grossly imbalanced negotiations that created the WTO in 1994. Since then, the role and effectiveness of the developing countries has gradually increased, especially since the other ”failed” ministerial in Seattle, in 1999.
With the support of United Nations agencies, the intergovernmental South Centre in Geneva and NGOs, developing countries have collected evidence on the negative effects of the WTO rules within their countries, and have produced legal, moral, social, economic and environmental arguments against them. They are also demanding that their largely paper special and differentiated rights be extended and become operational.
A range of developing country groupings came together as the Group of 90 during the Cancun ministerial in 2003 and blocked the expansionary agenda of the majors. At the same time, the G33 — now including 45 agricultural countries mainly in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean — were putting up vitally important proposals on their right to protect and support their small agricultural producers.
Hong Kong cannot be about ”how to respond to the demands of the majors”, but rather how to block their self-serving project, change the terms of the debate and shift the global balance of power.
Each ”failed” WTO gathering is contributing to global changes. These include the developing countries defending their ”policy space” to develop more effective productive bases; and promoting their own South-South preferential trade relations and economic cooperation agreements on terms different to those enshrined in the WTO. These changes will reduce their exposure to powerful political and economic forces in the highly industrialised countries.
Thus another impasse in the negotiations between the highly industrialised and the developing countries in the WTO is to be promoted and welcomed. If the overlapping established and emerging developing country alliances manage to prevent another unequal set of agreements being foisted on them by the majors, their resistance could be testimony to the fact that some form of more effective and genuine multilateralism is, at last, taking effect in the WTO. The question then remains whether even this will be sufficient to change what are intrinsically biased rules within an inequitable ”trade” paradigm and institution.
Dot Keet is research associate of the Alternative Information and Development Centre in Cape Town