BY SEAN HEALY
In the game of "chicken", two drivers test their nerves by driving towards each other at catastrophic speed. The first one to swerve to avoid collision loses. In a high-stakes game of "chicken" at the World Trade Organisation summit in Qatar, it was poor countries which lost their nerve at the last minute — and they will certainly be the losers.
After their miserable failure at Seattle two years ago, rich countries were desperate that the Qatar summit, from November 9-14, launch a new round of global trade liberalisation talks.
Fearing the collapse of the WTO and a subsequent weakening of their economic grasp, rich countries, led by the United States and Europe, were prepared to use every dirty trick in the book to get their way. And, in the end, they got what they wanted: the Qatar summit launched more talks on trade liberalisation.
For months, US trade representative Robert Zoellick and European Union trade commissioner Pascal Lamy have toured the world's capitals, twisting arms in attempts to get support for a new round.
Zoellick has even repeatedly attempted to link a new round not only with efforts to stave off world recession but with the fight against "revulsive [sic] destructionism" (terrorism, presumably).
In the past months, the major trading powers have convened "mini-ministerials", one in Mexico and another in Singapore, of 20-odd hand-picked countries in an effort to construct a false "consensus" for a round, keeping out more troublesome representatives of the least developed countries and pumping a compliant corporate media with tall tales of how close they are to agreement.
In WTO headquarters in Geneva, WTO General Council chairperson Stuart Harbinson, responsible for drafting the ministerial declaration, and director-general Mike Moore deliberately ignored the protests of more than 90 developing countries. In apparent violation of WTO rules, they eventually sent a draft text to the Qatar summit which did not have consensus approval from the General Council.
In Qatar itself, the summit chairperson appointed six "Friends of the Chair" to head working groups on the different controversial points, who would then negotiate a final agreement with parties. Non-government organisations (NGOs) mocked the process, saying that Seattle's controversial and secretive "Green Room'" negotiations had been replaced with "Green Man" negotiations in Qatar.
Threats and bribes
Individual countries have faced a combination of threats and bribes. Pakistan started to moderate its tone after September 11 and a considerable US package of concessions on trade access and debt rescheduling. Alongside India and Malaysia, Pakistan is a leader of the Like-Minded Group of developing countries opposed to a new round altogether.
Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was bombarded with phone calls during the last night of the summit from European and US officials, asking, cajoling, pleading with him to tell Indian negotiators to soften their position.
Haiti, the Dominican Republic and several other Caribbean nations, meanwhile, received letters not long before the ministerial revoking their special trade preferences with the United States, in apparent punishment for their opposition to further trade liberalisation.
Rich countries also sent delegations to Qatar which dwarfed those from developing nations, giving them a distinct negotiating advantage. The EU had 502 delegates at the summit, compared to two from the Maldives and one from St Vincent. China and India combined, with nearly 40% of the world's population, had only 92 delegates.
So bad did the behind-the-scenes intimidation get, that at one point representatives of the few NGOs allowed into Qatar held a protest outside a Zoellick media conference, chanting "No arm-twisting".
Even so, Third world countries held out for a long time. The last to succumb was India which, 18 hours after the scheduled end of the summit and after a night of talks in which First World negotiators reportedly approached panic, indicated that it would abstain, allowing passage of the draft declaration.
The launch of a new round of trade talks is undoubtedly a major gain for the developed capitalist nations. Anti-WTO campaigners in Qatar called the launch a "disaster for the world's poor", which will presage a stepped-up corporate assault on working people in both rich and poor countries.
Barry Coates, director of the World Development Movement, a long-standing campaigner against the WTO agenda, said: "This is a massive defeat for poor people around the world. The much-hyped development round is empty of development."
Third World Network director Martin Khor said in an interview with the French newspaper Liberation: "The final text ... limits the right of each country to promote its own development model. It will multiply social and economic tensions. This was a missed occasion: the WTO could have played the card of regulating globalisation, but it took the risk of deregulating it further still."
Jewel in crown
The jewel in the trade round crown is a commitment to launch negotiations on the highly controversial "Singapore issues": new rules on investment, competition, government procurement and trade facilitation.
Liberalising investment and competition regimes would be an enormous boon to First World corporations, allowing them unprecedented freedom, and legal protection, to move finance and production in and out of countries at will.
Third World countries have been vigorously opposed to the new issues since they were first raised in 1996, but the major trading powers have been able to bulldoze them.
The Qatar ministerial declaration mandates a two-year process of pre-negotiation, including identifying particular issues and hot-spots. A specific mandate to begin negotiations will have to then win consensus support at the next ministerial meeting in November 2003.
The mere opening of negotiations on 19 issues — from the WTO's Dispute Resolution Mechanism to the relationship between the WTO and multilateral environmental agreements — will give rich countries further opportunities for gains.
But rich countries did not get things all their own way: in the end, the only reason they won Third World support for a new round was by backing down on some significant issues.
Undoubtedly the most significant concession to Third World demands was on access to medicines. Underdeveloped countries, led by India, Brazil and Africa, have long sought an explicit statement that the agreement on trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS) cannot be used to prevent them providing cheap, generic versions of patented drugs to fight diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria.
The US and Switzerland, home to the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, had vigorously opposed any such statement — but in the end backed down.
A special declaration on the issue states that TRIPS "does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health".
While several major issues are unresolved, including poor countries' ability to import generic drugs when they don't have the capacity to manufacture them themselves, the final agreement has been welcomed by aid agencies and NGOs campaigning on the issue, which predict that it will reduce company challenges to countries' public health policies.
The pharmaceutical companies, meanwhile, have expressed their dissatisfaction.
Significant concessions have come in other areas too. The European Union has agreed on agriculture negotiations on "reductions of, with a view to phasing out, all export subsidies" — a hot topic for developing countries, as the EU has long dumped subsidised farm commodities on Third World markets.
The US, meanwhile, has agreed to negotiations on its "anti-dumping" policies, whereby it penalises imports (often from the Third World) which it deems too price-competitive. The US has until now refused point-blank to even talk about the topic.
In other areas, however, concessions to Third World demands are paltry. The summit approved a declaration on "implementation issues", a long list of Third World demands to correct imbalances and injustices in existing agreements, but the declaration includes little of note beyond "aspirations" to correct this or that issue.
For example, the US and Canada have refused to concede any expanded market access to Third World textiles.
Rich country negotiators, and their big business backers, are undoubtedly celebrating their victory in Qatar, as well they might. And global social movements certainly have their work cut out for them now in stopping the "free trade" juggernaut which has suddenly recovered its momentum.
But the outcome of the Qatar ministerial may prove more double-edged for Zoellick and Lamy than they currently realise.
The days when the rich countries were assured of getting exactly what they wanted in trade negotiations are now over. While it finally acceded, Third World negotiators fought harder, and gained more, in Qatar than at possibly any other trade summit, and with China now in the WTO, the rich countries' power to dictate may soon be further weakened.
While the champagne might still be flowing in corporate boardrooms, the dynamic underneath may already be shifting.
From Green Left Weekly, November 21, 2001.
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