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Collapse of Trade
Talks is a Stunning Victory for Global Justice Groups. Now What?
WTO:
Best Left for Dead?
By MARK ENGLER
With the failure of the Doha round of
negotiations in late July, some optimistic defenders of corporate
globalization will tell you that the World Trade Organization
(WTO) is taking a "time out." Most observers, however,
are calling the suspension of talks a "collapse." India's
trade minister, Kamal Nath, has judged that the trade negotiations
are now somewhere "between intensive care and the crematorium,"
and the future of the organization itself is in question.
The question for progressives
is: What does this mean for the future of the "free trade"
agenda?
For the world's poor, the WTO's
slip into a vegetative state is cause for rejoicing. The indefinite
suspension of the trade talks represents a clear victory for
the global justice movement, which visibly rallied against WTO
Ministerials over the past eight years in Seattle, Cancún,
and Hong Kong. Activists have long argued that, by treating environmental
laws, labor protections, and safeguards for small producers as
meddlesome barriers to commerce, the WTO fostered a trading system
that benefited multinational corporations at the expense of working
people in wealthy nations and in the global South alike.
Groups like Public Citizen,
a public interest watchdog, rightly regard the collapse of the
Doha round as a hopeful event. Lori Wallach, director of the
group's Global Trade Watch, released a statement arguing that
"Governments and civil society around the world now have
an extraordinary opportunity to create a multilateral trading
system that could actually deliver benefits to the majority."
The opportunity is genuine.
Yet stalemate at the WTO presents new threats as well.
Ironically, while the institution
was long derided by the left as an imperialist tool, it was also
disliked by segments of the right. Bush administration officials
who bristled at ever having to submit to a "global litmus
test" viewed the one-country-one-vote WTO with suspicion,
eyeing it as a potential multilateral check on U.S. prerogatives.
Approaching trade talks with
a unilateralist outlook, the White House has been unwilling to
make the kind of compromises necessary to keep the WTO afloat.
Doha negotiations failed because the U.S., along with Europe,
refused to make any significant concessions in ending its protectionism
on agricultural issues. Even while demanding that poorer nations
open their markets, elite governments channeled tens of billions
of dollars per year into subsidies for their own farmers, giving
the lie to the rhetoric of "free trade."
When the Doha Round of talks
was initiated at the 2001 WTO Ministerial meetings in Qatar,
it was dubbed the "Development Round." "Free trade"
boosters proclaimed that it would bring growth and prosperity
to the world. Developing countries weren't buying it. Bolstered
by the mass demonstrations of past years, their negotiators demanded
that, before they agree to further pry open their markets, the
U.S. and Europe make cuts in farm subsidies. Cuts were not forthcoming,
and the preaching from wealthy governments looked both cynical
and hypocritical. The result was the collapse of the talks.
So what happens next?
Wallach's vision of a better
trade system may ultimately be realized. But it won't come easy.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorin has stated that, as the
WTO unravels, international trade will operate according to "the
law of the jungle"--where the strong lord over the weak.
That suits White House unilateralists just fine, but it has given
some progressives the chills. In advance of an earlier WTO meeting,
British writer George Monbiot went so far as to publicly proclaim
that he was wrong in calling for the abolition of the institution:
"The only thing worse than a world with the wrong international
trade rules is a world with no trade rules at all," he wrote.
Outside of the WTO, the Bush
administration has focused in recent years on pursuing one-on-one,
bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with other countries.
In such negotiations, poorer nations cannot seek strength in
numbers. They can't join a negotiating bloc like the G20+, which
stood up to the U.S. and Europe at the Cancún Ministerial.
The bilateral approach has allowed the White House to broker
corporate-friendly deals with such countries as Australia, Chile,
Morocco, and Singapore--and the Bush administration is pursuing
many others. An FTA with Oman just passed through the House in
July, and deals with countries including Peru and Colombia are
now in works.
As Monbiot writes, President
Bush "is seeking to negotiate individually with weaker countries
so that he can force even harsher terms of trade upon them. He
wants to replace a multilateral trading system with an imperial
one. And this puts the global justice movement in a difficult
position."
Monbiot's concern is valid,
even if his conclusions are questionable. Confronting the bilateral
FTAs will no doubt present fresh difficulties for activists.
Still, that doesn't mean that saving the WTO is necessarily a
worthwhile task for progressives. After all, bilateral negotiations
were advancing with or without the multilateral body. And critics
of the Bush administration need not accept that our enemy's enemy
is our friend.
So far, efforts to reform the
WTO have met with no notable success. The idea of transforming
that body into an advocate for "fair trade" remains
a distant dream. In the near term, the organization was far more
likely to have cobbled together a bad trade deal that would have
further punished the poor. Thankfully, that has been averted.
Besides, before preparing nostalgic
eulogies for the WTO, we should make sure to check its pulse.
Trade talks have collapsed before. The pre-WTO Uruguay Round
of negotiations were stalemated in the early 1990s but later
revived and completed. Likewise, negotiators ultimately returned
to the table after the WTO's Seattle and Cancún Ministerials
ended in acrimony. The fact that presidential "fast track"
trade negotiating authority expires in mid-2007 will probably
rule out any U.S. return to the WTO in the next couple of years.
However, the organization might yet be resurrected by a future
administration that is more multilaterally minded than the Bush
cabal but no less fervent in its pursuit of corporate globalization.
To prevent this, the global
justice movement will need not only to take on bilateral FTAs
sponsored by Republicans. It will also have to rebuke pro-"free
trade" Democrats and build an opposition party that presents
a real alternative to corporate globalization.
In short, there is plenty of
work ahead. Those who want to fashion fairer systems of trade
and globalization will need continued perseverance and creativity.
Nevertheless, they can take inspiration from seeing the once-unstoppable
Goliath of the WTO in the aftermath of the Doha talks, lying
flat on its back.
Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City,
is an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus. He can be reached
via the web site http://www.democracyuprising.com.
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