Cancun: derail the WTO talks!
3 September 2003

The fences are up, the two mile exclusion zone in place; it must be another gathering of the rich and powerful, afraid of the anger of the people whose lives they disfigure. On 10 September thousands of officials and politicians will gather in the plushest hotels in Cancún resort, Mexico to try to breathe life into the faltering Doha round of international trade negotiations. Outside thousands of protestors will be trying to stop them.

The saturation of markets in North America, Europe and Japan makes it imperative that western multinational corporations get access to markets in the semi-colonial south. China and India are the prime targets.

The rules of the WTO are designed to pry open these markets, not only through the drastic reduction of tariffs, but by "beyond the border" measures. The result will be the further subjugation of economies and peoples in the developing world if the US and Europe governments get their way. But it will not be easy. Twenty years of tariff reductions in the South have devastated jobs and whole industries.

At Cancun a small select group of about 25 members will take the key decisions behind closed doors. The others will be barred from the most critical meetings. Any deal will only be put to the rest later. Those countries daring to resist will be blackmailed, bribed, or bullied. Aid, IMF and World Bank loans will be promised or withdrawn depending on how countries react to the demands of the big powers. Market access, particularly any preferential trading arrangement with the USA, will be put on the line.

Smear campaigns will be launched against any minister, trade diplomat or government daring to step out of line. How do we know all this? It is all contained in the book Inside the WTO launched to the fury of the WTO bureaucrats in the run up to Cancun and based on interviews with Third World ambassadors to the WTO in Geneva.

Agriculture is the critical issue at Cancun. The last set of international trade negotiations in the 1980s and 1990s (the Uruguay Round) saw developing country governments agree to more liberalisation, while the imperialist countries increased their levels of protectionism. Post-Uruguay Round subsidies to developed countries producers in the OECD have increased from around $248 billion to about $311 billion.

"Dumping" - the export of products below the cost of production - has increased. By the WTO's own admissions, the EU dumps about $72bn a year onto the poorest countries, while the USA dumps $19bn. This is the result of the Common Agricultural Policy which lines the pockets of farmers and agribusiness in Europe while destroying the livelihoods of farmers in Africa and Asia. In the US and the EU, money is given to farmers to stay in production, whilst multinationals offer producers rock-bottom farm gate prices so that government subsidies are primarily benefiting the big agri-business corporations.

Developing countries' farmers have been wiped out by dumping. Small farmers in the South are losing the battle to compete with the cheap imports flooding their domestic markets. Rural unemployment and poverty are on the rise.

At the WTO's conference in Doha, the current round of negotiations was cynically described as the "development round": poorer countries would get more this time, specifically the reduction of dumping and subsidies by Europe and the USA. But it just hasn't happened. That is why the developing countries governments - not natually anti-imperialists - are making increasngly hositle noises to the rest of the WTO agenda.

Intellectual property
Another issue at Cancun is the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Trips). The Trips agreement requires members to provide a 20-year long patent protection to inventions. It gives multinationals patent protection over seeds, the very source of life, and medicines.

A massive international campaign over access to drugs for the Aids epidemic led in December 2002 to an WTO agreement permitting the manufacturing of cheaper generic drugs domestically in order to mitigate the Aids crisis and those of other treatable diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis.

But the USA refused to sign up to it - the pharmaceutical industry was one of the biggest campaign contributors to the Bush administration. Washington wanted more controls on the export of generic drugs from countries such as Brazil and India to other Third World countries that could not manufacture them themselves.

Only at the very end of last month - the eve of Cancun - did the USA sign up because the South's representatives made clear that no agreement on anything was going to happen without movement by the USA on this.

Even so the big pharmaceutical firms have won huge concessions. Compulsory licences must be obtained by any country wanting to export generic drugs, as must any country wanting to import them. The aim of the expensive, bureaucratic negotiations with patent holders is to make it difficult for companies to produce cheap alternatives to expensive branded drugs and allow the USA to veto Third World firm exports to any country (e.g. the Philippines) that the US drugs companies deem to be capable of manufacturing them.

This in effect means the very poorest countries can have their medicines - but the price is that the countries with a chance of breaking out of poverty, through the development of knowledge based industries like pharmaceuticals, must be stopped from effectively competing with the multinationals of the G7.

In the run up to Cancum, formulas are also being worked out between the US, EU and Canada for steep tariff cuts for the developing world's imports. On 12 August the US announced it would like to have tariffs be brought down to zero by 2015 and the EU published a proposal to have maximum tariffs of only 15 per cent.

If the developed countries get their way in Cancun, the implication is that developing countries' industrial tariffs would be brought down across the board to very low levels. Tariffs - import taxes - are the only protection most developing countries have against the superior competitive and technological edge of the imperialist multinational corporations. Slashing tariffs will only cause further deindustrialisation and unemployment.

Added to this a decision will be made in Cancun on whether or not to start negotiations in the areas of investment, competition, procurement and trade facilitation. If the US and EU have their way, the agreements in investment and competition will remove the ability of governments to regulate the activity of foreign investors. Eventually, these new agreements would force developing countries to put all foreign companies active in their states legally on a par with domestic industries. If agreed this would just lead to local companies going bust as they fell to predatory pricing by the multinationals.

This will effectively extend the remit of the WTO to capital investment as well as trade, levering open the economies of developing countries to the further ravages of globalisation.

Separately to the Cancun discussions, there is a much horse trading going on over free trade in services (the so called General Agreement on Trade and Services, or GATS). This is designed to open up markets like water or education to western firms - look at Iraq today being pawed over by Bechtel if you want an idea of what the USA and EU have in mind. The developing countries are supposed to be formulating "offers" to the big powers of what they are prepared to open up to the mulitnational service companies.

Unfortunately for the WTO - and its newly installed figurehead, Buddhist monk Superchai Panitchpadki - the governments of the developing world are increasingly prepared to challenge the inequalities that stand behind "free trade". Desparing of getting progress on agriculture, they are increasingly digging in over GATS, the "investment issues" and tariff reduction.

On top of that they are attempting to make the WTO into a nominally democratic organisation: with formal meetings, minutes, impartial chairs etc. A group of 15 "like minded" developing countries put forward a whole plan for consitutional reform of the WTO that would effectively put it under control of its Third World membership. It was summarily rejected.

The anti-globalisation theorist Walden Bello has issued an influential call to use these issues to block progress at Cancun: since the key to maintaining the momentum of the WTO is getting the investment issues onto the table, he has called for this - plus the democracy issue - to be a line in the sand.

Unfortunately the courage of the capitalists of the Third World always seems to run out the further they are from the masses actually affected by imperialism's plunderous trade policies. Arguably it was only the crass attitude of the WTO and Bill Clinton, combined with the presence of thousands of demonstrators on the streets, that gave them the courage to walk out of the Seattle conference without an agreed declaration.

Cancun - according to the WTO - is not "make or break". It's a "reviewing" conference on the way to a final accord in late 2004, they say. In practice, preventing an agreement at Cancun will deal a severe blow to the momentum of globalisation. With trade falling as a proportion of world GDP, and GDP growing slower, it will be a further proof that globalisation is above all else a policy - not just some disembodied objective force we all have to live with. Its been promoted by policy: it can be reversed by policy - and so can the deepening hunger, ill health and illiteracy of the countries it affects.

In the dreams of the globalisers, one day all this calculated horse trading will come to an end: the EU and America scrap their farm subsidies, the developing countries scrap their tariffs and human history reaches a crescendo to the accompaniment of Bechtel engineers marching into the waterworks and power stations of the whole world. In their nightmares the WTO falls apart, with competing trade blocks being formed between the major powers, and access to the superprofits on offer in the global south restricted.

Our aim is to make sure their nightmare comes true.

At Cancun, the Mexican workers and their allies - the international anti-capitalist movement, must make the meeting the site of mass blockades and protests of the kind that derailed the Seattle ministerial.

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