Thoughts from London

End game or another farce
If the developing world expects the World Trade Organisation talks beginning in Cancun, Mexico on Wednesday to create conditions conducive to the elimination of poverty and bring solace to billions of people caught up in this vicious cycle, it might as well believe in fairies.

As the curtain is about to rise on the trade ministers' talks, there are unmistakable signs that the rich nations have already reneged on their promises made at the WTO talks in Doha in November 2001.

Those talks were held shortly after the audacious terrorist attack on the United States in September that year which shocked Americans and the world into the realisation that even the sole surviving military and economic superpower is not immune. Coincidentally, the WTO talks start the day before the second anniversary of that terrorist attack which led America to turn from traditional bluster to introspection and do some much-needed soul searching.

They looked for the country's political and diplomatic fault lines that many academics and experts in the field of modern terrorism believe lay at the heart of the problems that culminated on 9/11, as that day is now known.

Decades of bitterness, frustration and anger at Washington's intransigence over the accumulated grievances of people deprived of hearth and home and the basics of life exploded that day in unprecedented attacks on two symbols of American power- World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

The diagnosis was clear. The United States needed to be more humble and appreciative of the problems that confront the developing world. It was against the background of 9/11 and the persistent danger of not responding positively to the ills of the developing nations that the members of the WTO met in Doha where western trade ministers declared almost at the outset that they would abolish all export subsidies.

Against the backdrop of the terrorist attack that exposed the essential vulnerability of the west for all its wealth, the rich nations seemed suddenly to discover the inequities of the first round of talks known as the Uruguay round and agree to abolish subsidies.
If at Doha the developing world celebrated for winning what they thought was a major concession- the withdrawal of agricultural subsidies to western farmers that so harm the so-called Third World- today those western promises are proving to be nothing more than unmitigated grandiloquence.

The most eloquent testimony that the western nations had indulged in sleight of hand came late last week when the European Union's agriculture commissioner Franz Fischler lau-nched a bitter attack on the developing countries and the NGOs that campaign for a fairer deal for the poor.

He rejected calls for substantial reductions in Europe's agricultural protectionist policies as extreme demands couched in "cheap propaganda" and dismissed numerous recent attacks on the EU's common agricultural policy (CAP) as "intellectually dishonest" public relations exercises.

As a counter to the highly reduced cuts contained in the Washington-Brussels joint proposal prepared for Cancun, some leading developing countries have produced their own plan demanding much bigger cuts in subsidies to western farmers that result in mountains of surplus food which are then dumped in the developing countries harming local farmers and driving them out of their jobs. But what is the reaction of the EU's agriculture chief?

"If I look at the recent extreme proposal co-sponsored by Brazil, China, India and others, I cannot help the impression that they are circling in a different orbit", Fischler said. "If they want to do business they should come back to mother earth. If they choose to continue their space odyssey they will not get the stars, they will not get the moon, they will end up with empty hands".

Mr Fischler's obsession with the moon and the stars seems to suggest that he belongs to the lunatic fringe of officialdom that has to be brought down with a thud to terra firma.

Fortunately not all in the European Union agree with Mr Fischler's short sighted diatribe that can only exacerbate the current differences instead of narrowing them down in order to achieve a successful end to the negotiations by the scheduled target date of December 2004.

Britain's chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown said the other day that in the forthcoming summits in Cancun and then Dubai-where the World Bank/ IMF meeting is due- the international community must confront the global war against poverty.
He said it is "a war that must be won if we are to succeed in our war against global terrorism".

That is a much more realistic approach that sees a causal connection between the twin problems of poverty and terrorism unlike the perceptions of the mandarins that sprout in Brussels ready to renege on the solemn promises made by western trade ministers less than two years ago.

Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University and a Nobel Prize winner writing to The Guardian newspaper last month said that many fear that what happened in the past will happen again in Cancun. That is "secret negotiations, arm twisting, and the display of brute economic power by the US and Europe aimed at ensuring that the interests of the rich are protected."

Professor Stiglitz and Gordon Brown both pointed to an important statistic that is often glossed over by defenders of western agricultural subsidies. A cow in Europe gets a subsidy of $2 a day. But as Chancellor Brown asserts more than a billion people in the world's poorest countries subsist on just one dollar a day which is below the poverty line.

Commissioner Fischler dismisses this comparison saying the argument is "not only intellectually dishonest, it is factually irrelevant". Admittedly it is irrelevant to European cows and others whose thinking is akin to what one might euphemistically call bovine rubbish.

But it is hardly irrelevant to those who still have the milk of human kindness and are determined to correct the economic inequities that manifestly have serious political ramifications, testing democratic structures and even leading to what the west today calls global terrorism.

Commissioner Fischler's tantrums are directed only at the developing countries, possibly because some of them have had the temerity to make counter-proposals that require the west to approximate the intentions it so clearly declared in Doha.

What the EU commissioner fails to mention out of the intellectual dishonesty that he sees in others, is that the United States is also critical of Brussels' stand on some agricultural policies and the Europeans are at loggerheads with Washington on issues such as steel where the US has clamped down heavy tariffs on imported steel. When the world's two most powerful economic blocs exchange charges it is the developing countries that eventually suffer. As the old saying goes when elephants fight the grass gets trampled.

Back to Columns