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Call to end 'arm-twisting' at
Cancun
By Sanjay Suri
LONDON
- A group of leading development organizations have
asked for an end to "arm-twisting" tactics at the
meeting of trade ministers in Cancun, Mexico. The
UK-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have
asked British Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt to ensure
transparency and fairness at the talks this week.
In doing so, they have joined 11 African nations
that had come up with a similar demand three weeks ago.
However, their proposals have not been backed by the
European Union or the United States.
The demand
was given a new immediacy after it won backing by former
World Trade Organization (WTO) ambassador for the
Dominican Republic, Federico Cuello. He said he was
speaking from first-hand experience of such tactics.
The developing countries in the WTO "are not
free to speak nor to associate", Cuello said at a
meeting organized by the NGOs to present their demands.
"Countries are penalized for speaking their
minds or for building alliances with like-minded
countries. Countries are not free to promote their
national interests. Their issues are ignored unless
presented as group proposals."
If these groups
become effective, "their ambassadors are removed from
their posts", he said. "I should know this, as I,
together with five other of my colleagues, was one of
the victims of a collective decapitation of ambassadors
that started at Doha."
The NGO group, which
includes ActionAid, Christian Aid, Friends of the Earth
England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Royal Society for
the Protection of Birds, Scottish Catholic International
Aid Fund, World Development Movement and WWF-UK, has
presented a set of practical suggestions to ensure
greater transparency in negotiations at Cancun.
These suggestions include the following:
All negotiating meetings should be announced at
least six hours in advance to the entire membership
through a daily calendar.
No country is to be excluded from meetings.
The chairs of negotiations should be neutral and
elected by all the member countries, not hand-picked by
rich nations. In the present chair-driven system,
increased reliance is placed on chairpersons, which
gives unprecedented power to hand-picked individuals.
Ministerial meetings should not be extended without
warning or agreement. There must be a cut-off time
because small delegations have no capacity to stagger
their human resources.
Negotiators should be allowed time to eat and sleep.
At Doha some meetings continued 38 hours at a stretch.
Negotiating documents should accurately reflect the
views of all WTO members, and not just the EU and the
US. The WTO Secretariat must be neutral when members are
in disagreement.
"We have witnessed first-hand
at Doha how the WTO process is manipulated by strong
countries," said Tom Crompton from WWF-UK. "We have had
too many of these mini-ministerial meetings of
hand-picked ministers," he said. "This has been done in
a way that excluded the vast majority of WTO members."
EU officials have said that the demands made by
the group of NGOs cannot be met. "The rejoinder is that
it is difficult to manage the decision-making process
for 146 countries," Crompton said. "But our proposals
are very specific, procedural things."
At Doha,
he said, ministerial meetings were extended, and many
ministers from smaller countries had to leave because
they could not prolong their stay. "This may sound a
trivial procedural matter, but meetings must finish when
scheduled," he said.
"Developing countries are
hopelessly outgunned from the start," said Peter
Hardstaff from the World Development Movement. "At
negotiations in Doha, the EU had over 500 delegates,
Mauritius two, and Haiti, the poorest country in the
Western Hemisphere, had none. The whole system should be
geared to helping these countries have a voice, yet it
consistently acts to silence them. The bullying behavior
and lack of real rules at the WTO would disgrace a
village bowls club."
The NGO arguments have been
bolstered by the publication of the book Behind the
Scenes by WTO watchers Fatoumata Jawara and Aileen
Kwa.
"Arm-twisting through a combination of
threats and inducements to countries and ambassadors was
a key feature of the process leading to the 'agreement'
in Doha," the authors say. "Only the rich have real
leverage, while most developing countries are so
desperate for trade opportunities, aid, debt reduction
etc that they have little choice but to succumb."
The report claims that the United States
maintains a list of "unhelpful" developing-country trade
negotiators. It says the supposedly neutral WTO
Secretariat has often misinformed developing countries
about the position of others.
The report says
that at Doha Tanzania, like some others, "caved in under
pressure and succumbed to the offer of a few crumbs".
But only a week later the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) suddenly announced
that Tanzania would receive external debt relief of US$3
billion over time.
Attempts by developing
countries to rectify the situation that makes this kind
of thing possible have been met "either by cursory
dismissal or a wall of silence", the NGOs say in their
statement. A move to correct this situation made last
year by 15 countries in Geneva could have been a crucial
step in the right direction, but no such step was taken,
they say.
(Inter Press Service)
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