Global Policy Forum

By Washington Akumu

Deep-seated suspicions and the ghost of Cancun will be abroad this week, as developing countries and their richer cousins from the North try to forge an acceptable trade deal. The General Council meeting in Geneva, which started yesterday, is the first structured attempt by the World Trade Organization to weld a consensus, following the veritable "Tower of Babel" that triggered the dramatic collapse of the Ministerial Conference in the Mexican holiday mecca of Cancun last September.

Then, as now, the main point of contention were the so-called Singapore Issues, which are being pushed by the European Union and its allies in the developed world, like the US and Japan, as a way to further open up world trade to multinational owners of capital. Even then, informal discussions on these issues have been going on in Geneva, and it is understood that developing countries are under increasing pressure to relent on their opposition to their being tabled as part of the Governing Council's agenda.

The fact that most of the big international firms, which would be the main beneficiaries if the Singapore Agenda were to see the light of day, are domiciled in the developed world, has led the poor countries to counter that their EU partners were hurriedly pursuing narrow interests, when there was a lot that needed to be corrected on the current structure and the workings of global trade. First mentioned at the Singapore Ministerial meeting in 1996, the issues mostly relate to the operations of transnationals firms and include investment, competition policy, public procurement and trade facilitation.

It is believed that the end-game of any agreement on these issues is that the big firms and their agents would get unfettered access to carry out their activities in any part of the world and compete for the minutest municipal contract.

In many ways the Cancun debacle was the crystallization of what had started way back at so-called Development Round in Doha, Qatar: that there would be no just cause for free trade a la WTO, unless the fact that countries existed at various levels of the development scale was factored into any emerging treaty. At the very crux of the Cancun impasse was the insistence by poor countries that there was no just case for the introduction of a new slate of issues, before the current perceived wrongs in the global commercial dispensation were addressed.

And the mascot on which these sentiments rode was the contentious issue of farm subsidies, which the EU continues to dole out to its agricultural exporters at the rate of one billion dollars a day, despite the distortions this brings to world trade, and in direct negation of the free trade and level playing field doctrines on which WTO was founded.

Cancun was thus a watershed in more ways than one. For once a WTO impasse had been largely triggered and played out in the negotiating rooms, and not on the streets, as was in Seattle and Doha. In fact in more ways than one, the message of the street protests that have become a signature feature of all WTO parleys, had finally found its way into the hallowed grounds of the global trade police.

Another marked feature of Cancun was the solid edifice of solidarity built by the developing countries, which stood even after the EU and the US had applied all manner of pitches to test the faith of influential states like Brazil and India. Cancun was the siren that called attention to the injustices of the global trading system, pursued as part of the Washington Consensus, with its blindness to the disparity of nations, and brought to critical focus the very future of the multilateral approach to trading issues.

Kenya's civil society movements, in a communication ahead of the meeting last week, asked African governments not to budge on their post-Cancun positions and resist all attempts to re-introduce the Singapore issues to the agenda. "Cancun proved our position that the Singapore Issues are beyond what we normally see as trade. These issues can be best tackled as part of government policy or other appropriate bodies like the United Nations and the World Customs Union," they said in a joint statement.

They argue that the adoption of binding rules on the Singapore Issues would limit the manoeuvrability of government policy and stymie the pursuit of national development objectives. The say that even the EU, which has been the loudest proponent of the agenda, had no faith in its case, citing the bloc's decision to drop at least investment and competition from the contentious foursome at the final moments of the Cancun negotiations. Even then, it accuses the powerful bloc of hypocrisy and going back on the word of its chief negotiator Pascal Lamy, who had allegedly given the undertaking that the "concession" would hold.

It is understood that the strategy being pursued by the EU in the latest round of engagement is the use of so-called plurilateral negotiations, as a replacement for the collapsed multilateral talks. The former is a unitary opt in or out approach, where there is little room for taking group positions which turned the tide at Doha, with developing countries bandying together under such banners as Group of 21 etc.

"It is obvious that the plurilateral way is a tactical approach by the EU to introduce multilateral agreements through the backdoor. The choice faced by poor nations is stark: they can take part in negotiations on issues they did not want in the first place, or be forced later to be part of an agreement they had no influence over." Hence the fresh push to have the Singapore Issues completely dropped from the WTO agenda once and for all.

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