Archived version.
The World Trade Organization’s fifth Ministerial in Cancún ended in failure. Instead of a manifesto for international trade liberalization, the negotiations deadlocked and the WTO secretariat was ultimately only able to wring a skimpy six-paragraph statement from its delegates.
Outside the Ministerial, there was unvarnished delight from the protesters at the talks’ collapse. The text being mooted in Cancún, had it been agreed to, would certainly have impoverished rural communities in the developing world. But as the WTO heads back to its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the prospects for transforming the deadlock into institutional reform — where decision-making power would shift and resulting law would help the world’s poor — seem very far away.
The Bush administration, not for the first time, seems to have become frustrated with multilateralism when other countries won’t play ball. Robert Zoellick, the U.S. trade representative, has suggested that he will now pursue a go-it-alone trade strategy, bypassing the WTO in favor of bilateral deals with individual nations.
Sadly, post-Cancún talk seems to involve less reappraisal than recrimination. The United States and the European Union seem unwilling to compromise on the needs of those in the poorest countries. Instead, the blamestorming has begun in earnest. The United States and the E.U. have pointed fingers at developing countries in general, and at Brazil and India in particular.
The E.U. and the United States were keen to negotiate around rules for investment, government procurement, and competition policy. These are areas in which European and U.S. business stand to gain a great deal, yet in which there has been little advantage shown to exist for developing country economies.
At the same time, developing countries — led by India, China and Brazil — wanted progress on agriculture and, in particular, wanted the United States and E.U. to reduce the agricultural subsidies that have been hurting developing country farmers for decades. The E.U. and United States budged not at all, despite a welter of proposals from developing countries throughout the Cancún process.
It would be nice to think that, as a result of this failure, rich countries might have learned a thing or two, that they might be willing to change their negotiating style, offering greater concessions to the poor, working on ways to compromise on issues that affect struggling farmers, heeding the lessons of compromise and diplomacy.
We might hope for a renewed, humbled commitment to democratic practice at the WTO by the most powerful countries on earth. Through this, we might hope that the agricultural issues of greatest concern to the poorest on earth, would be removed from the WTO’s mandate, as demanded by the social movement Vía Campesina.
Alas, a sober assessment of past and present tactics suggests that there have been few post-Cancún epiphanies. The Cancún outcome should, after all, have come as no surprise to either the E.U. or U.S. Agriculture has been haggled over since the WTO’s last meeting in Doha, November 2001. Despite numerous compromises tabled by developing countries, the E.U. and the United States refused to open talks on the most pressing issue for poor farmers — domestic subsidies that cause lower crop prices which, in turn, destroy the livelihoods of the poorest farmers in developing countries. Instead, the E.U. and the United States consistently ignored these concerns, pushing their own agriculture agenda through successive WTO discussions. If, at any point in the past 18 months, they had listened to the concerns of developing countries, they would have known that their proposals on agriculture could never have been accepted.
The future looks bleak. The evidence suggests that the United States isn’t interested in negotiation so much as an imposition of its economic policy on the developing world. Faced with the difficulty of getting agreements established in multilateral forums, the lesson the U.S. has learned is not one of compromise, but rather that it’s easier to pick off countries one-by-one, rather than en masse.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has already signaled his intention of bypassing the WTO and its troublesome states entirely, pushing forward with regional and bilateral agreements such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas, Central American Free Trade Agreement and the Middle East Free Trade Area. Similar sentiments have been echoed by the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Charles E. Grassley, (R-Iowa), who declared his intention to “take note of those nations that played a constructive role in Cancun, and those nations that didn’t,” punishing and rewarding as necessary.
With this sort of diplomatic wit at the helm, we can only expect the tone of U.S. international economic diplomacy to continue to be petulant, bullying and destructive.