Alan Oxley: Protesters ignore the benefits of trade
November 14, 2002
THE protests about the World Trade Organisation are as far from reality as
the recent Gay Games were from the Olympics.
The Gay Games were staged to have an event. The Olympics were held to
showcase the best of sport. The protesters are here to protest. The WTO is
here to help the world's poor.
The protests are so unreal they are frivolous. Protesters claim the WTO is
the tool of multinational corporations. So why have 40 developing countries
joined the WTO in the last decade and 30 more have applications in?
They claim the WTO oppresses the poor. So why do the leaders of the world's
biggest countries with the largest number of poor regard the WTO as the
best hope to raise living standards? They claim it despoils the environment
and denies human rights. It does neither. It promotes trade and through
that prosperity. Desperately poor countries cannot protect the environment
and have the worst records of human rights abuse.
They say the WTO is undemocratic. Members don't think so. The WTO takes
most decisions by consensus and gives more legal power to poor and small
countries to challenge the actions of rich countries than other
international organisation. They don't consider it undemocratic.
The gap between the rhetoric of the anti-globalisation protesters and the
reality has puzzled observers for years. Barun Mitra, director of the
Liberty Foundation in New Delhi, a free-market non government organisation
think tank, first encountered this when he went to Seattle to observe the
now famous WTO riots. He is visiting Sydney to report on the WTO meeting.
"I thought then that the protesters just didn't understand the issues,"
Mitra told Australian journalists at a briefing yesterday. "No country in
the world has prospered by being closed. India is a case in point. When
India embarked on its self-sufficiency program after independence, its
share of world trade fell and growth slowed." he explained. "The IT sector
in India has flourished because it is not smothered with government rules,"
he went on.
Mitra says these NGOs do not attract support in developing countries like
they do in the West. The reason is the poor see things differently. They
want growth and prosperity. They know trade creates it. Mitra helped
organise Indian farmers and South African street hawkers to protest in
favour of free trade at the Johannesburg summit on sustainable development
last month.
He says he now sees the Western NGOs in a more cynical light. He believes
they are not basically interested in eradicating poverty in the Third
World. Some even have a vested interest in seeing it perpetuated. It makes
it easier to draw funds from government agencies in the West. He says
people would be astonished if they knew how much money is directed to
anti-globalisation groups by aid and environment agencies in rich countries.
This may surprise people, but it is a regular subject of discussion among
leaders of developing countries. Ernesto Zedillo, a former president of
Mexico, addressed the role of Western NGOs at a private dinner during the
WTO ministerial conference in Doha when the current round of WTO
negotiations was launched a year ago.
"We Latin American presidents always raised this issue with president
Clinton when we discussed development in Latin America," he told the group.
"We told him American NGOs pushed first world agendas, set up local
copycats and did this on US aid money. Clinton used to joke that he
preferred they were doing this in our backyards rather than his," concluded
Zedillo.
Leaders of international institutions have found the protest movement
frustrating. When counselled to have dialogue with the protesters, both
Mike Moore, former director general of the WTO and James Wolfensohn,
president of the World Bank, found nothing changed. The attacks continued.
The reason is that the core of the protesters do not want dialogue, they
want action. Why? The primary reason for attacking the WTO is that is a
success. Does that seem a small reason? It is. It is as small as the amount
of reality in their complaints.
Alan Oxley is the former ambassador to the General Agreement on Trades and
Tariffs.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,5481704%255E7583,00.html
The liberty foundation is an Indian CATO institute and is in the pocket of
Monsanto much like CATO is in the pocket of pig Tobacco.
Zedillo!?
Say no more.I rest my case.
