The collapse of the WTO talks: why we should care
On Tuesday 29 July, ministerial-level negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) collapsed. Many international development charities, including the World Development Movement and ActionAid welcomed the breakdown in talks, arguing that “no deal is better than a bad deal”. Whilst this isn’t the place to go into controversial and arcane economic debates about the pros and cons of free trade, we should mourn the collapse of negotiations in Geneva.
It isn’t necessary to repeat the clichés about a globalising world to understand that an ever-increasing interdependence obliges us all to pay greater attention to the way our domestic politics - and our lifestyles - affect our fellows on the other side of the world. International trade and the WTO negotiations are not just about bureaucratic economics, they are intensely political issues that should concern us all. Oxfam International estimates that “if Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America each increased their share of world exports by just one per cent, the resulting gains could lift 128 million people out of poverty.”
Certainly, the WTO can be criticised on various levels. The organisation is attacked for an alleged corporate, neoliberal, Western bias. It’s legally binding nature angers those who feel constrained by this international bureaucracy - although, incidentally, the WTO employs just 625 staff members. Developing nations are systematically excluded from secretive “green room” talks, while their meagre means are dwarfed by the resources of the EU and US. Rich countries maintain protectionist measures while expecting developing countries to liberalise their economies. According to CAFOD, “the average European cow receives over $2 a day in support from the Common Agricultural Policy, which is more than half the world’s people earn.” This bullying hypocrisy only adds to public hostility towards the WTO and its agreements. Civil society and the public at large are permitted only very limited input into the agenda and activities of the organisation. Iniquitous deals, forced liberalisation and mission creep - including controversial decisions on environmental protection and intellectual property - extend the charge list still further.
These concerns - and others - led around 40,000 people to take to the streets at the ministerial-level WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. Indeed, a major film dramatisation of the protests was released last year. The recent meeting in Geneva was not as high-profile an event as the Seattle ministerial, but one has to ask: where were the protests this time around? Where was the media attention? Of course, the Seattle protests ended in rioting and both the motives and the attitudes of many of the protesters can be questioned, but at least people were paying attention.
The WTO is certainly flawed and challenging those shortcomings is essential. However, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The WTO remains the “least bad option”. Those who attack the organisation itself, rather than the behaviour of trade negotiators, lack a plausible alternative to the WTO’s multilateral approach. The stalling of the recent talks will surely lead to more bilateral trade deals, such as the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As Jack Thurston wrote in The Guardian on 30 July, “these deals will increase complexity and uncertainty for exporters rather than reducing it, as Doha would have done.”
The potential gains from a fair WTO round are huge. Back in 2003, World Bank estimates suggested that a successful Doha Round could result in gains of hundreds of billions of dollars, for both the developed and developing worlds. At a more pragmatic and self-interested level, those gains include ordinary taxpayers in Europe and the US being released from having to pay those cows quite so much.
The deal on the table in Geneva this time around was far from perfect. It may, after all, have been worse than no deal at all. Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, goes the saying at the WTO. Yet positive progress was made in several areas and it would be a shame for those gains to be lost because of acrimony in more minor aspects of the talks.
Public and civil society engagement with world trade shouldn’t be about black-clad anarchists rioting. It shouldn’t even be about capitalism. World trade is a dominant feature of today’s economy and intelligently embracing it means making trade fair for all. Some have hailed the collapse of the latest set of talks as the end of the Doha round itself. Far from what anti-globalisation activists would suggest, this would be catastrophic for the chances of a genuinely fair playing field in international commerce.
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However, despite the impressive and high-minded beginnings of the round in 2001, the Doha Development Agenda - to give its full name - no longer has much to do with improving living standards in developing countries. Due to a combination of economic factors and a lack of political will, that ideal is over, for the present at least. This is a very great shame, to put it mildly. Yet these observations say nothing of the fact that this round has dragged on for almost seven years so far. For some of the people that a prospective deal ought to be helping, seven years is a fifth of a lifetime.
As such, publics around the world need to be much more engaged with these issues. Despite what many activists - and economists - would say, politics is the answer. When it comes to world trade, we need to be more politicised, not less. Talk of tariffs, quotas and subsidies may sound boring, but this is real politics and it affects real lives. The naïve idealism that says “all you need is love” is simply not good enough.
Above all, the creation of trade rules that are fair for everyone requires pressure from citizens. Perhaps the WTO does not want to listen to what the man in the street has to say, but rest assured that it can be made to hear.
