February 18, 2000
Bangkok, Thailand -- Approval of a key U.N. action plan aimed at assisting developing nations appeared blocked on Friday by long-standing rows between rich and poor countries over farm trade and corruption, diplomats and officials said. They said hopes were dwindling that the 52-page document, which details the agenda over the next four years for the U.N.'s trade and development agency (UNCTAD), could be wrapped up as hoped by the end of the day.
"It's not looking too good. There are differences between the big powers on agriculture, and between North and South on governance and how we should handle corruption in our countries," said an Asian developing country negotiator. The problems at the key UNCTAD meeting in Bangkok mirrored similar problems that brought the collapse of a World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial conference in Seattle in December.
"I get the strange feeling that I've been here before," said one emerging economy ambassador who represents his country in Geneva at both the WTO and UNCTAD. As with the WTO declaration that was to have been issued at the end of the Seattle gathering, the UNCTAD draft text had been the subject of weeks of closed-door discussion in Geneva before the conference opened last Saturday.
Much of the document -- unlike the detailed but doomed WTO effort in Seattle -- is couched in general and uncontroversial terms. It hails international trade as a motor of growth for both industrialised and developing powers -- a concept contested by some hardline leftist non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Bangkok -- and urges more support for the poorest countries.
But diplomats say the United States and countries like Australia and Thailand in the 17-nation Cairns Group of farm produce exporters, which straddles the North-South divide, want wordage on agriculture that the European Union cannot accept. Backed by Japan and South Korea, as well as Norway and Switzerland, the 15 nations of the EU are seeking to avoid -- as the group did in the pre-Seattle WTO discussions -- any clear commitment to end export subsidies to its farmers.
As the negotiations continued, Thai farmers and workers gathered near the conference to protest that WTO agreements on opening markets, as well as structural reforms demanded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were destroying their livelihood. The farmers -- like others in Asia, Latin America and Africa -- complain that while their governments have opened up to foreign imports after the 1986-93 Uruguay Round of decisions, their produce still has little access to the vast EU and Japanese markets.
Developing countries say the EU's huge subsidy programme to its own farmers amounts to a barrier, and gives farmers in countries like France, Spain, and Germany an unfair advantage in exporting their own produce. In a reference to this and a similar North-South row over textile markets, Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Friday told UNCTAD delegates that while poorer countries had made sacrifices they had got little in return.
On the corruption issue, the United States and European countries want language in UNCTAD action plan to commit governments in developing countries to fighting against bribery and extortion in the granting of contracts and in business. But the developing countries say that while they recognise a responsibility to enforce good domestic governance, they cannot accept being targeted on the corruption issue.
In his speech, Bouteflika said it was "unfair and unjust" for the industrialised powers to accuse poorer states of responsibility for corruption when the general poverty that caused it was largely the result of the behaviour of the North.
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