The Doha Round bluff

Najma Sadeque

 

It is both common sense as well as established wisdom for hundreds or thousands of years that a community or a country does not and should never relinquish control over the land and waters and other naturally-endowed aspects from which people derive their sustenance, the materials for their daily use, their livelihoods, their surplus for barter or trade, and their very survival. Whatever people traded, they have never given up control over agriculture - except under sheer duress against their will, as happened during colonialism. But once colonialism passed into history, it was never even suggested or expected that any country should compromise any area of their economy such as agriculture that could erode citizens' economic rights.
The final GATT negotiations were an eleven long years process before it culminated in the creation of the World Trade Organization, so South country governments had no excuse not to inform their respective peoples what it was all about. They had plenty of time to initiate widespread public debate on issues that would affect every person on earth socially, economically and politically in the most far-reaching way. Had that been done, the stronger of the developing countries may not have ever joined up or would not have allowed the contentious issues to become part of the WTO regime which the western industrialised countries are trying to force down our throats - those of agriculture, services and non-agricultural market-access. They may have found the wisdom to create their own regional trading system at the outset as some are belatedly doing today on mutually acceptable terms unlike under the WTO where the rest of the world is expected to march to the beat of western demands; and they may have dealt with trade outside their region as before or under a separate system on a country-by-country basis. Now people are paying the price for their governments' arrogance and self-serving indifference.
The last round of talks, known as the Doha Round, which the west has sought to be made binding, fell through in Hong Kong where people from all over the world representing the majorities who had already suffered from WTO and stood to lose even more, came out in protest. Enough was enough, they declared, and they would take no more -- and for once they were largely supported by their own governments. Since then the western industrialised countries have been struggling to get the talks back on track because their own hi-tech living styles plus huge corporate profits, depend mainly on the exploitation of the South countries.
Last week, on June 26th, fifty-six international and regional civil-society organisations and movements working for equal economic and social rights globally, wrote a strong open letter to all the Trade Ministers of all the member-countries of the WTO. Copies were sent to the WTO Director-General, Pascal Lamy who is also Chairperson of the Trade Negotiations Committee; the Chairperson of the Committee of Agriculture, Special Session, and the Chairperson of the Negotiating Group on Market Access.
The signatories opened their letter by saying "they were appalled at the direction the current WTO negotiations were taking which preclude any possibility of benefiting the majority of the world's people, particularly those living in impoverished developing countries."
The Doha Round was dubbed the "Development Round" to make it appear it was being done for the benefit of the developing countries. But nobody was fooled. Not any more. On the contrary, many of the proposals put forth by the west were meant to prevent South governments from being able to determine their own domestic policies in the interests of their own citizens. Every time the developing countries have put forth proposals that try to accommodate the western countries demands but at the same time try to retain the option to formulate and carry out necessary domestic policies, the west consistently rejects them, particularly USA and the EU.
As far as the western countries are concerned, the global trading system should not have to be bothered with matters such as sustainable economic growth or decent jobs, protection of the environment, or human rights. Although they use evasive language to hide their motives and use much empty rhetoric to claim that their objectives are in the interest of all humanity, they do not match the truth. Harsh as the accusation may sound, they are actually lying and being hypocritical. Eleven years of developing countries' shocking experience under the WTO following the dubious Uruguay Round agreements has taught the South painful lessons.
Since the developing countries refuse to budge on vital issues which spell their very survival, the industrialised countries are now trying to bulldoze their demands in a mini-Ministerial, in which the majority of WTO members are not represented, and would be illegal. But then, "legitimacy", as George W. Bush has demonstrated, depends on who's holding who at gunpoint and is not cancelled by lies, underhand methods, economic sanctions, or threats or actions of military attack.
The letter from the South representatives clearly spells out :-
"We are writing to you with three basic demands:
1. Object to the legitimacy of the June mini-Ministerial and withdraw support. As a basic rule of democracy, and out of respect for the WTO's procedures and mandate, any Ministerial called by the WTO Secretariat must allow for the effective participation of all Ministers.
2. Reject any attempt by Director-General, Pascal Lamy to draft his own text for Ministers' consideration.
3. Start now with a new approach to the multilateral trading system. The Doha Agenda should be buried.
New rules should focus on policies that promote human rights and people-centered ecologically sustainable development."
The letter states the reasons for the above demands. It says: "A series of economic reports on the projected outcomes of the Doha Round from the World Bank, U.N. and several think tanks including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, quantify the costs of the Doha Agenda. These analyses predict that most of the gains expected under the Doha proposals as they stand will flow to the developed world. The remaining gains are distributed among a few exporters from middle-income developing countries."
"This is an unacceptable outcome from multilateral talks", the letter states bluntly, with strong backing from movements in the industrialised north as well. Signatories among many others include Action Aid International; Focus on the Global South International; the Australian, Finland and Denmark branches of Friends of the Earth; the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations Holland; the Alliance for Democracy USA; Food & Water Watch USA; Common Frontiers Canada; the Council of Canadians; the Belgium, Spain, Switzerland and Portugal chapters of Africa-Europe Faith and Justice Network (AEFJN); and the Argentina, Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium chapters of ATTAC.
Many developing countries did reluctantly agree to have fresh new talks in the WTO when promised that steps would be taken to correct the serious imbalances in the Agreement on Agriculture which have already destroyed millions of family farms and livelihoods worldwide. Instead, deceitfully, agricultural talks have been consistently hijacked by the west to continue to push for expanding global markets the developed and middling-developed countries to the poorer countries.
Nothing has changed, and the fact that even previous promises of increasing market access in the west for the South countries, have not been kept. The west also pretends not to be aware of the repeated fact that uncontrolled imports of agricultural products into local markets of the less developed destroys local economies and livelihoods.
In the same breath, dumping of agricultural products such as cotton, maize, rice, poultry, dairy, and sugar by the U.S. and the EU continues unabashedly, driving down commodities prices for the self-same crops that are the mainstay of poor South farmers.
The G33 countries had made a proposal on Special Products and Special Safeguard Mechanism - which is supported by over a hundred WTO member countries. The proposal sets down minimum criteria for food and livelihood security and rural development, and defines the mechanisms for developing countries to protect their agriculture from economic assault. But the western country-members of the WTO are fighting it; they don't seem to believe that the South countries peoples have the same rights to food security and livelihoods and a decent standard of living that the west jealously guards for itself.
In the case of investment in natural resources which the South is rich in and which the North is dependant on, under NAMA or the so-called non-agricultural market access, which would include fisheries, forestry and mineral resources, the tariff cuts that the west demands will end up in completely eroding the industrial base of developing countries while destroying the environment. The end result would be de-industrialising of the affected South countries by being forced to become and remain producers of primary products until the resources run out, only to be abandoned as usual without jobs and resources.
The west claims, according to their own questionable calculations that the developing countries together will benefit as a whole from the Doha Round by US $6.7 billion. But several independent analyses find that the total losses from tariff revenue cuts alone would be ten times that paltry $6.7 billion. The poorest developing countries would suffer terribly, and would actually lose unskilled jobs in manufacturing industries along with market share in some or all manufactured products.
The final nail in the coffin would be services, which the signatories have defined as the most anti-development of all. Under the callous and conscienceless structural adjustment trickery imposed by the World Bank and IMF, South governments had already been forced to stop supporting or curtailing basic services such as water supply, sanitation, health, education, and utilities. That wasn't enough. Now the west was demanding that these services should be allowed to be open to foreign investment to be run on a commercial basis for profit only, not available to those who couldn't pay for them - which would mean denying the overwhelming majority of the population. They actually want that foreign corporations be allowed to operate without any restrictions whatsoever in domestic markets.
To compensate for the supposed short-term ill-effects of such measures which would lead to further unemployment and the decimation of some industrial sectors, the west is proposing an "Aid for Trade" scheme with more development assistance. This is yet another bluff for the entire South is familiar through direct suffering what 'development assistance' has done to them over the past six decades.
The signatories end by declaring in no uncertain terms :-
"The current Doha package is a bad deal. It serves the private interests of the biggest corporations around the world, most of them headquartered in the developed world. It fails to respond to a series of publicly identified public policy priorities for trade: full employment under decent conditions, sustainable management of our natural resource base, the generation of domestic capital to build virtuous economic circles in poor countries, the need to curb dumping of under-priced agricultural commodities in world markets, the market distortions created by monopoly and oligopoly power exercised by a small number of firms in many sectors of the global economy (including banking; food and commodity exports, processing and distribution; and, oil.) It is time to start now with a new approach to the multilateral trading system. The Doha Round should be buried, starting by withdrawing support and objecting to the legitimacy of the June Mini-Ministerial."