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Gloomy forecasts dog Cancun
opening
MEXICO CITY - On the eve
of the World Trade Organization's Fifth Ministerial
Conference, it was difficult to find anyone who
predicted a happy ending, one with loud applause for its
success, as occurred at the Fourth Ministerial two years
ago in Doha, Qatar.
The forecasts of WTO
officials, of trade ministers, analysts and
representatives of civil-society groups range from
moderate optimism to total failure, due to the inability
to reach prior agreements on farm trade, a key issue in
the trade-liberalizing negotiations.
Mexico's
seaside resort where the WTO ministerial summit opened
on Wednesday has become a political border dividing
European governments from non-governmental organizations
(NGOs).
Already, the Cancun meetings have
polarized public opinion across Europe, with governments
there warning that a collapse of the WTO summit would be
a major setback for world economic affairs, while most
NGOs working on issues such as economic cooperation, the
environment, and human rights think just the opposite: a
failure at Cancun would be a good thing.
Certainly, the NGOs have been holding
demonstrations across Europe for weeks now to say that
the WTO summit will do nothing to improve environmental
and social standards.
NGOs such as the
Confederation Paysanne, a farmers' union that supports
organic farming, Greenpeace, Association for the
Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of
Citizens (ATTAC, after its French name, Action pour la
Taxation des Transactions Financieres pour l'Aide aux
Citoyens), and the public servants' union SUD organized
the first major demonstration in France August 8-10.
In Cancun, WTO director general Supachai
Panitchpakdi said that, unlike what some observers have
suggested, the meeting of the organization's 146 member
states is not a question of winning and losing.
"It will be neither a success nor a failure,"
the official told the Mexican newspaper El Universal,
referring to the conference on Mexico's Caribbean coast
that ends on Sunday.
The aim of the Cancun meet
is not to initiate or wrap up trade talks, Supachai
stressed.
Eduardo Ramos, director of
international programs at Mexico's Economy Ministry,
said "spectacular decisions" should not be expected in
Cancun, because it is a follow-up meeting and that
discrepancies persist among the member countries.
The objective of the Cancun ministerial
conference is to advance the trade-liberalizing talks
laid out in what is known as the Doha Development
Agenda, defined by the WTO ministers at their fourth
conference, held in November 2001 in the Qatari capital.
The Doha Agenda, which sets January 2005 as the
negotiations deadline, aims to bring developing
countries closer to the presumed benefits of free trade
through measures that must be adopted unanimously by the
146 WTO members.
If the Doha Agenda is
implemented and if the farm subsidies applied by the
nations of the industrialized North are gradually
eliminated, global welfare will improve to the tune of
US$748 million, says the WTO in its 2003 annual report.
Trade growth associated with the reduction of
agricultural subsidies - which among the rich nations of
the North total almost $1 billion a day - would allow a
reduction in poverty worldwide of no less than 13
percent by 2015, according to the WTO.
German de
la Reza, an expert in trade and integration, said that
"the conversations between the United States and Western
Europe to reduce agricultural subsidies have not let up,
which suggests that their representatives will have an
additional proposal to announce in Cancun".
"No
country wants the ministerial conference to fail,
because at stake is a great deal of previous effort and
resources as well as interests," said the expert.
But the discrepancies in the farm trade talks do
not seem to be attenuating. A bloc of 20 developing
countries, led by Brazil, is demanding that the EU and
United States go farther in dismantling their systems
for supporting farmers and subsidizing agricultural
exports than proposed in an EU-US initiative last month.
The tensions reached the point that EU
Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler said the demands
of the 20 countries gave "the impression that they are
circling in a different orbit".
If the group of
developing countries continues "their space odyssey,
they will not get the stars, they will not get the moon,
they will simply end up with empty hands", said
Fischler.
Robert Zoellick, the US trade
representative, in regards to the discord, warned that
if the WTO negotiations fail, Washington would hammer
out trade deals with those countries that want to "move
forward".
Oxfam International, the Britain-based
humanitarian organization, states in its report "Running
into the Sand in Cancun" that the Fifth Ministerial
Conference is the final opportunity for industrialized
countries to comply with the Doha Round of negotiations.
"Failure at Cancun would do to the WTO what the
Iraq war did to the United Nations: undermine its
influence and marginalize it," said Oxfam.
The
Latin American Economic System (SELA, for the Spanish
Sistema Economico Latinoamericana) joined others with
its hardly optimistic predictions, stating that it is
unlikely that the trade ministers in Cancun will achieve
positive results, given that the preparatory talks could
not resolve key differences between the industrialized
North and the developing South.
Among those who
forecast a total fiasco - some of whom admit that this
is their goal - are various civil-society organizations
that are participating in the People's Forum for
Alternatives to the WTO, a counter-event of nearly a
thousand groups taking place parallel to the official
meet in Cancun.
"We are staking our bets on the
complete reformulation of the WTO," so a complete
failure of the ministers' conference "would be best",
said Hector de la Cueva, spokesman for the Mexican
Network of Action Against Free Trade.
Thousands
of delegates from NGOs and independent activists, who
say they are against the globalization model being
negotiated at the WTO, are gathering this week in
Cancun's parks and plazas, while the ministers meet at a
modern convention center. The objective of many
participants in the alternative forums and protests is
to "derail" the ministerial conference.
Mexican
economy official Ramos is calling upon the trade
representatives to make the greatest effort to attain
agreements. "Mexico, as host, is drawing on all its
abilities to bring the different parties together," he
said.
The agreement reached last month on
facilitating poor countries' access to low-cost, generic
medicines is an example to be followed, said Ramos. The
official noted that the WTO members, after two years of
negotiations, agreed on August 30 that developing
countries can import generic drugs for fighting health
emergencies such as AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Generics are identified by their active
ingredients and are much cheaper than their trademarked
equivalents, owned by transnational pharmaceutical
laboratories.
However, on other trade issues,
such as industrial tariffs, market access, intellectual
property, investment and agriculture, among others,
negotiations are still pending - and time is up for any
pre-conference accord.
Gobind Nankani, vice
president of the poverty-reduction network of the World
Bank, says the success of the Doha Round is of crucial
importance because it could "make a difference for
millions of poor people around the world".
An
agreement on reducing farm subsidies is essential, he
said, noting that the sums the rich countries give their
farmers is greater than the combined gross domestic
product of Africa and is six times the total spent on
development aid worldwide.
But the path of the
negotiations has not yet been able to eliminate farm
supports or produce accords on other issues, meaning
that "the strong and open trade" that the WTO says is
necessary for global development remains in its nascent
stages, just like the Doha Round itself.
(Inter
Press Service)
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