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Autopsy of a
Failure
Anti-globalization demonstrators voiced their demands in the streets. Centro de Medios Independientes
John Ross
Latin America Press
World Trade Organization talks in Mexico were a total washout.
Luis Ernesto Derbez, Mexican foreign minister and the official host of the fifth ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), took to the podium on Sept. 14 to adjourn the Cancun, Mexico trade summit that had brought together 148 nations. Pounding his wooden gavel sharply, Derbez dismissed the delegates, but the sound that emerged was like that of a hammer pounding nails into the WTO’s coffin.
While the four-day WTO summit ended in a total failure for the super-power economies of the world, not all those present were quite so funereal. Led by Oxfam, British non-govenmental organizations gathered to warble Beatles’ tunes with slightly altered librettos such as "Can’t Buy My World" and, behind police barriers eight kilometers away from the meeting hall, anti-globalization forces from many nations danced a wild jig as news of the WTO failure spread.
"This is the WTO’s waterloo," grinned Walden Bello, the respected Philippine anti-globalist, who has been locking horns with the Geneva-based WTO since it’s founding in 1995. "The World Trade Organization is like a bicycle — if it doesn’t move forward, it falls down."
The stunning collapse of talks in Cancun left US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick sputtering. The normally low-key veteran negotiator accused the developing country bloc known as G-21 of contaminating the Cancun talks with harsh "rhetoric."
With agriculture as the main bone of contention, the G-21 bloc — 23 developing nations led by Brazil, India, and China — demanded that the United States, Japan and European Union (EU) member nations abolish huge farm subsidies and high agricultural tariffs, a concession the US administration generally regarded as suicidal as the United States enters an election year.
What Zoellick labels "rhetoric" is reality for poor and developing nations. While Japan allocates US$7.50 a day to every cow in its archipelago, the overwhelming majority of the world’s impoverished peoples barely survive on $1 to $2 per day. According to the World Bank, an agreement to reduce tariffs worldwide could have lifted 144 million people out of poverty.
Whilst Cancun did not result in a beneficial agreement for the developing nations, what is an indisputable triumph was the surprising solidarity of the South. In its debut WTO summit, China, a rich country with millions of poor farmers, stood solidly with the developing world. This newfound solidarity was forged in the face of Zoellick’s maneuvering to split the G-21 asunder and pit poor against not-so-poor economies and big agricultural exporters against very poor net food importers.
US President George W. Bush’s administration was not only concerned about Cancun, but what the failure might do to his cherished Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) (LP, Dec. 2, 2002).
Reverberations from the WTO revolt will surely surface at the upcoming FTAA ministerial meeting this November in Miami. The key role played at Cancun by Brazil, now governed by ex-steel worker Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has been the most adamant obstacle to the projected FTAA 2005 start-up, is not a good omen for US plans to extend the dubious benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Failure to implement the FTAA by 2005 will mean expiration of the White House’s "fast track" negotiation authorization, without which no deal can be struck.
The Cancun collapse also torpedoes timetables for the Doha round and seriously compromises the WTO’s credibility. Technical talks are scheduled to resume in mid-December in Geneva where the Big Four — United States, EU, Canada and Japan — may ask for rule changes to limit groups of countries like G-21 from blocking consensus.
"The WTO operates like a medieval institution," grumbled EU Trade Minister Pascal Lamay.
One underlying reason the United States was unable to impose its will upon the rest of the world in Cancun was palpable resentment at the White House’s unilateral aggression in Iraq (LP, April 9, 2003), resulting as it did in the diminishment of the United Nations as a multilateral forum. Having burned multilateralism in Iraq, Bush was burned by multilateralism - with a distinctly southern flavor — in Cancun.
The Cancun conclave was overshadowed by the suicide of South Korean farm leader, Lee Kyung Hae, on the first days of talks and protests. Lee, wearing a sandwich board proclaiming "The WTO kills farmers" climbed a police barrier and thrust a dagger deep into his heart. Shocking as it was, his suicide is not uncommon among farmers all over the world — in India’s Karmataka state, more than 200 poor farmers have reportedly taken their lives since crops failed in April and a Mexican campesino recently set himself on fire.
The South Korean farmer’s suicide cast him as an instant icon of agrarian desperation in the third world and more than metaphorically, proved to be a dagger to the heart of the Cancun talks. According to delegates, Lee’s death stiffened the resistance of poor and developing nations to the massive subsidies and double talk of US, EU, Canadian and Japanese governments.
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