Negotiations in the WTO are heating up – and they are going
badly.
By Deborah James / AlterNet
Also
on Huffington Post.
Remember the
"Doha Round" of the WTO? Yeah, I wish I didn't either.
Negotiations in the WTO are heating up -- and
they are going badly. In November last year, WTO members agreed to come up with
a "Work Program" for resurrecting the Doha Round by July 31. As you
may remember, it had been stalled for years, but since the new
Director-General, Roberto Azevêdo of Brazil, took over in September of 2013, he
has been shaking things up. The first WTO expansion agreement, on "Trade
Facilitation," was concluded in December 2013, along with a promise to
negotiate to reduce WTO constraints WTO on developing countries' ability to
feed their poor.
It must be
remembered that developing countries only agreed to launch a new round of
negotiations in order to address problems with the previous round that resulted
in the founding of the WTO in 1995. Since then, they have been advocating for a
series of fixes to the existing agreements. Many of their proposals dovetail
with calls from global civil society for a turnaround in
the global trade agenda.
However, after nearly 14 of negotiations, the
United States has decided that India, China, Brazil, and other developing
countries -- in which the vast majority of the world's impoverished people live
-- can no longer be considered as developing countries. Even worse, they want
to clear the deck of the development demands and get on with introducing even
more radical liberalization agenda. Thus the U.S. -- sometimes in conjunction
with the European Union, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, but sometimes
unilaterally -- is insisting on jettisoning the previous agreements,
"re-calibrating" the talks, and reducing the ambition of the deal.
Unfortunately, what they are pushing to keep is the wrong agenda, and the
agreements they are insisting on abandoning are all of the desperately needed
improvements.
That's why
last week, 341 civil society organizations from more than 100 countries sent a letter to WTO
members demanding that governments stop negotiating on the
wrong agenda of WTO expansion, and instead take up an agenda focused on food
security and urgent development needs of countries for global trade rules that
facilitate rather than hinder development.
With the Work Program deadline just weeks
away, in advance of the 10th Ministerial meeting of the WTO in Nairobi fast
approaching this December 15-18, 2015, the time is short for governments to
change course.
Wrong Agenda: Further
Liberalization of Services and Goods and New Corporate Wish Lists
There is a lot about the Doha Round that
should be jettisoned. The letter notes that "[n]egotiations to further
liberalize 'trade in services' through the expansion of the General Agreement
on Trade in Services (GATS) must be immediately halted. Strong public oversight
over both public and private services is crucial for democracy, the public
interest and development, as well as for the orderly functioning of the
services market. The deregulation of the financial sector which was encouraged
in part through 1990s-era rules of GATS led to the recent global financial
crisis and the ensuing worldwide wave of recessions."
That,
along with our belief in quality, accessible public services, is one of the
many reasons why civil society also
opposes services liberalization through the proposed Trade in
Services Agreement (TISA). You may not have heard of the TISA, because
negotiations -- ongoing for more than two years now -- are being held in
secret. Fortunately Wikileaks released
the largest trove of
secret trade documents last month on the TISA, and just last week released
updated versions with analysis --
including the core text.
"For similar reasons we oppose the
continuation of negotiations to further liberalize trade in goods through the
Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) pillar," continues the letter.
"The structural transformation that is required for many African countries
and LDCs to create jobs and alleviate poverty -- key aspects of the proposed
Sustainable Development Goals -- requires the protection of infant industries,
the promotion of added-value exports, technology transfer, and other tools that
were used by every developed country on their path to development. In addition,
the global jobs crisis in which tens of millions of people remain unemployed
cannot be resolved with more liberalization of trade in goods."
That's why the letter notes that "[a]ny
future negotiations on trade in goods -- including those in the NAMA
negotiations but also in the proposed pluri-laterals including the expansion of
the Information Technology Agreement (ITA-II) and the negotiations on
Environmental Goods -- must focus on job creation and the Decent Work agenda
developed by the International Labor Organization working in conjunction with
the global labor movement, rather than on the narrow agenda of reducing
corporate taxes."
Throwing Development Overboard
But it gets worse. The main
goal of the U.S. and friends is to clear a path in the WTO to introduce a
dangerous set of new issues that correspond to their agenda in the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP). These include the so-called 'Singapore Issues' like
investment, government procurement, and competition policy, which were rejected
by developing countries in 2003 in the WTO and cannot be introduced while the
Doha Round is still in play, along with other issues including disciplines on
state owned enterprises and electronic commerce.
They
intend to do this by getting rid of the Doha Round: either by concluding a
smaller version (with just the bad bits) or by permanently suspending it. A
main strategy is to split developing countries, by pitting the Least Developed
Countries (LDCs) against the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South
Africa) and other so-called "emerging-market" countries to ensure
that India, China et al also "make concessions" as if they were
developed countries -- when they have the largest populations of poor people of
any countries! And the shenanigans involved in the negotiations have gotten out
of hand: secret "Green
Room" meetings where zero African countries and zero LDCs
are invited. As the former leader of the alliance of all developing countries
in the WTO when he was Brazil's Ambassador, Director General Azevêdo should be ashamed.
The Right Agenda: Food Security
and Development Flexibilities
If that
weren't enough, the United States is unilaterally blocking discussion of the
needed changes to WTO, focused on food security. Last November, members agreed
to have a permanent solution on food security by December 31, 2015. This is to
address one of the worst hypocrisies in WTO rules: while most developed
countries are allowed to give subsidies to large agribusiness exporters, even
what those subsidies damage other countries' markets, poor countries are not
allowed to subsidize poor farmers to buy
food for hungry citizens. Although this seems like an obvious
candidate for immediate change, talks have been stalled as the U.S. refuses to
even discuss it at the WTO.
At the
same time, it is refusing to talk about previously agreed flexibilities to
allow developing countries to deal with devastating agricultural import surges
(called the Special Safeguard
Mechanism) and insisting that all flexibilities for developing
countries must be dropped.
If that
wasn't enough, the U.S. is refusing to talk about
cutting its trade-distorting domestic support and its export subsidies -- and
remember, that's the reason developing countries agreed to the round to begin
with! This issue is core to countries like Brazil, and Azevêdo, who led the
charge of developing countries for many years. Now he is clearly taking the
side of the developed countries, as he made a new proposal for everyone to cut
their subsidies -- even China and India, when they need to be
able to increase them, but for the poor and hungry instead of agribusiness
exporters.
And that's just in agriculture. The developing
country agenda of changing rules across the WTO, and helping LDCs benefit more
from trade is not even being discussed.
Azevêdo is apparently upset that
his secret Green Room tactics are being criticized, and was finally forced to report to the membership about
the secret talks.
Much like when he was able to get a deal on
Trade Facilitation during the last Ministerial meeting in December 2013 --
without anyone having the time to read the final text -- many experts in Geneva
think it is actually possible to conclude a deal by this December.
In Our World Is Not for Sale
network, we have been clear: after 20 years of failed policies of the WTO, it
is time for a Turnaround! There needs to be an
immediate cessation of all talks for further liberalization, and instead
governments around the world need to start working in a completely different
direction for global trade talks that put jobs, food, and sustainable
development issues first.
Civil society needs to send a clear message to
turn around the direction of global trade talks. Building on the global letter,
work on the national level to ensure that elected officials reflect our goals
and values is essential.
What happens if we don't act
now?
If we fail to get an agreement on food
security this year, countries like India, but also Botswana, Cameroon, Egypt,
Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nepal, Senegal, Tunisia, Zimbabwe, and even LDCs
including Bangladesh, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia, who have public
stockholding programs, will be constrained from implementing this best
practices to reduce hunger on a massive scale. This means, flat out, that more
poor people will go hungry.
After 20
years it is clear that there are a lot of problems with the existing WTO. If we
allow the status quo to continue, the terrible rules will continue to have
negative impacts on people, including not letting countries achieve the proposed Sustainable Development Goals being
negotiated in the United Nations.
On the other hand, if we allow the WTO to
expand liberalization, it would mean even more race-to-the-bottom policies
would be bound by international law. Think of it as austerity but mandated
legally, and just about impossible to get out of.
If they are able to officially close the Doha
Round, either by getting a bad deal or by "suspending" it, it leaves
the terrain open for them to bring investment, competition policy, government
procurement, and other policies back into the WTO.
Instead, civil society must hold governments
accountable to turnaround the agenda and remove WTO obstacles to food security,
and respond to developing countries' needs for more flexibilities in the rules.
The letter from civil society
concludes: for the Nairobi Ministerial to be a "success," it must
deliver on development and turn around the WTO.
That would be a first step towards a much
larger transformation of the current global trade rules from a system that
focuses on expanding trade, to focusing on enabling states and communities to
achieve food, jobs, and sustainable development -- and that will be a world
without the WTO.
This
post was originally published on Alternet on
July 10, 2015.
—
Deborah James
Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) network
Stop the TISA! (the proposed Trade in
Services Agreement) http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org/en/themes/3085
Remove WTO Obstacles to Food
Security! http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org/en/themes/3084