Global Policy Forum

By Justin Forsyth

Last November 30 a disruptive and well-organized minority caused the Seattle ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization to crash amid rancor and riot. The wreckers have been chipping away at the WTO's credibility ever since. No, these people are not the anti-WTO protesters. The wreckers are the governments of the richest countries, which have spent the past year blithely breaking promises and shoring up their own national interests.

Poorer countries are today more disillusioned with the WTO than ever, and the rules-based trading system is in danger of collapse. This would be a tragedy. With firm action, the WTO could realize its potential to oversee global trade in a fair way that drives development and reduces poverty. This month in Geneva, Oxfam interviewed trade officials from the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Bangladesh, Cuba, Jamaica, Lesotho and Uganda, and spoke privately with other Southern delegates at the WTO. We wanted to know what had changed since the Seattle fiasco. In a word: Nothing. Joshua Setipa, from Lesotho, said: ''After Seattle everyone realized there was a problem in the whole system. The bulk of the membership had lost confidence. We identified confidence-building measures to ensure that developing countries wouldn't get left behind.''

Delegates say the rich members have fallen short on each and every one of these ''confidence-building'' measures. Fundamental inequalities in trade agreements that developing countries wanted changed have not been changed. Rich markets remain shut, especially in textiles and agriculture. Resources promised to poorer countries to build up their capacity to deal with the huge array of complicated rules have not materialized. ''There has been no movement at all,'' said the Dominican Republic's trade ambassador, Federico Cuello Camilo. ''Sufficient and sustained efforts have not been made by the developed countries to build our confidence in the WTO, '' agreed Abdul Mannan, the economic minister in Bangladesh's mission.

Nelson Ndirangu, of the Kenya mission, said the confidence-building issues had been relegated to subsidiary bodies where they would ''be left to fizzle out.'' Rich countries have been allowed to maintain high levels of domestic farm subsidies while forcing developing countries to open their agricultural markets. Mr. Setipa said: ''What has the WTO and market liberalization brought for Lesotho? Up till now, I haven't seen anything. The only thing I have seen is the opposite. The agreement on agriculture has almost wiped out our domestic industry.'' ''The WTO was supposed to correct trade-distorting practices, but instead it has created a development-distorting environment,'' Mr. Cuello said. ''Rich countries continue to subsidize their producers with impunity. Rich countries say that these issues can only be discussed in a new round of WTO negotiations. But thereis no trust (among us) that they will be addressed.''

The major trading nations have failed to provide tariff- and quota-free access for all products exported from the world's 48 poorest countries. This in spite of the substantial economic benefits that it would bring to these countries, which are home to 10 percent of the world's people and yet now account for a mere 0.5 percent of world trade. ''They have been halfhearted about opening their markets to the least developed countries,'' Mr. Mannan said. Ernesto Marziota, a member of the Cuban mission, said there had been ''no political willingness'' to open rich markets. Ambassador Ransford Smith of Jamaica said Japan had recently calculated from preliminary figures that it could cost each Asian-Pacific developing country $6 million to apply new trade rules.

''If extrapolated to all developing countries, the price tag of conforming to these agreements would be well over halfa billion dollars. The WTO is inviting a public relations nightmare if it remains insensitiveto this.'' Said Mr. Cuello: ''The WTO was supposed to have been an impartial referee of common rules, where countries could learn to play the game. ... It hasn't turned out like that. The rules are biased against the weak, and nothing has changed since Seattle.''

Against this background, it is not hard to see why calls for abolition of the WTO are growing. But abolition is a counsel of despair. It offers nothing more than a power vacuum in which the powerful can use their economic muscle to bully the powerless into submission. We need a rules-based system of global governance that places people before corporate power, and shares the benefits of globalization more equitably. But we need to get the wreckers under control.

The writer is policy director at Oxfam GB, the British member of the anti- poverty group Oxfam International. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.