> impossible, and thus provided the intellectual ammunition for the
> Jubilee campaign;
>
>- continued to remind the world that a great cause of the crisis of
> Third World countries was not their lack of liberalization but the
> plunging prices of their raw material and agricultural exports and
> the continuing deterioration of the terms of trade against them;
>
>- pointed to the tremendous potential instability posed by
> unregulated global financial flows and the threat posed by the
> liberalization of the capital accounts of developing countries;.
>
>- emphasized the continuing critical role of activist state policies
> in sustaining development at a time that the reigning neoliberal
> ideology sought to reduce the state's role to providing the legal
> framework to promote the unfettered flow of goods and capital;
>
>- underlined the many biases against developing countries of the
> GATT-Uruguay Round and showed how, when it came to such agreements
> as the Agreement on Agriculture and the Agreement on Textiles and
> Garments, the developed countries were not delivering on their
> commitments.
>
>Together with the United Nations Development Program's Human
>Development Report, UNCTAD publications provided unassailable
>empirical evidence that globalization was spawning greater
>inequalities between and within countries. The annual Trade and
>Development Report served as a healthy antidote to the paeans to
>the free market and free trade coming out of World Bank and WTO
>publications such as the World Bank Development Report.
>
>Opportunity Awaits Seizure
>
>The collapse of the Third WTO Ministerial in Seattle provides an
>opportunity for UNCTAD to reclaim a central role in setting the
>rules for global trade and development. But this cannot be on the
>basis of the old paradigm and old practices that have marked the
>UNCTAD approach. For example, the old assumption that underlay the
>Prebischian model that full integration of the developing countries
>into the world economy is the way to prosperity must be questioned
>in light of the many negative consequences of globalization which
>have become painfully evident, including the dangers that accompany
>the loss of self-reliance in agricultural and industrial production
>owing to the volatility of the global economy, such as the erosion
>of food security in developing countries where agriculture focuses
>on export-oriented production.
>
>This is related to the need for UNCTAD to incorporate many of the
>insights of ecological economics, which sees global trade, whether
>managed or free, as one of the key factors destabilizing the
>national and global environment. It must give serious
>consideration to the principle of subsidiarity in production and
>trade-that whatever can be produced locally with reasonable cost
>should be produced and traded locally--as a way of preserving or
>enhancing the health of both environment and society.
>
>Ecological economics and feminist economics drive home the point
>that "efficiency" or the pursuit of reduction of unit cost-the
>driving value of neoclassical economics-must be questioned, if not
>displaced, and UNCTAD must elaborate a different paradigm that
>subordinates narrow efficiency to the values of social solidarity,
>social equity, gender equity, and environmental integrity.
>
>UNCTAD's analysis must also move away from an overwhelming focus on
>international trade as the key factor in development and pay greater
>attention to both the economic and social measures that would allow
>for greater reliance on the internal market, including asset and
>income redistribution, such as land reform, that would create the
>economically empowered citizen consumers that would serve as the
>engine of the local economy. The indispensable and necessary links
>between growth, national sovereignty, and social reform must be
>placed at the center of trade and development policy.
>
>The absence of serious attention to internal social reform owes
>itself to a simplistic North-South view of international economic
>relations. But equally important, UNCTAD has been too long a club
>of Southern governments and states that are uncomfortable at the
>examination of their internal political and economic arrangements.
>UNCTAD, in other words, must see that its constituency goes beyond
>governments to include, more fundamentally, their citizens. Thus,
>UNCTAD must not only solicit input from civil society and
>non-governmental organizations but also open up its decision-making
>processes to them.
>
>In this regard, the words of Rubens Ricupero, UNCTAD's managing
>director, apply not only to the WTO but to the organization he
>leads. Decrying the "persisitent inability" of international
>organizations to engage civil society, he warns that, the net
>result is that frustration, fears, and concerns finally find
>expression in a confrontational and sometimes violent attitude,
>often leading to disruption and a feeling of confusion. There is
>a clear need to reach out to the concerned individuals and
>organizations, to offer them an opportunity to be heard by
>governments not only when they march and protest in the streets, to
>start a process of ordered and respected dialogue with those who
>want to debate the central issues related to trade, investment,
>financial crisis, job insecurity, growing inequality inside nations
>and among them.
>
>Moving to Center-stage
>
>Institutional and analytical reinvigoration is essential if UNCTAD
>is to break out of the cage that the rich countries have fashioned
>for it and carve out a much more powerful role in trade and
>development issues. Also essential is the will and the vision to
>accompany this process.
>
>In this regard, both the draft "Plan of Action" and "Bangkok
>Consensus" are disappointing. Both documents broadly adhere to the
>North's limiting UNCTAD's mandate to "research and policy analysis;
>consensus-building; and the provision of policy advice and technical
>assistance aimed primarily at capacity building." Such an approach
>does not go beyond the "positive agenda" of the last few years,
>which put the emphasis on enhancing, via technical advice, the
>capacity of developing countries in the context of WTO negotiations.
>That role was essentially one of holding the hands of developing
>countries as they integrated into the WTO. It was also a role that
>led to UNCTAD being deployed as a "fixer" for the WTO in
>controversial issues, such as the way it was was recruited to become
>part of a WTO working party on investment during the Singapore
>Ministerial in 1996 in order to legitimize the process of bringing
>investment into the jurisdiction of the WTO.
>
>What UNCTAD should be doing, in the aftermath of Seattle, is
>challenging the role of the WTO as the ultimate arbiter of trade
>and development issues. UNCTAD should instead be putting forward
>an arrangement where trade, development, and environment issues must
>formulated and interpreted by a wider body of global organizations,
>including UNCTAD, ILO, the implementing bodies of multilateral
>environmental agreements, and regional economic blocs, interacting
>as equals to clarify, define, and implement international economic
>policies.
>
>UNCTAD, in particular, should push to become not just a forum for
>the discussion of policies. UNCTAD should become, as Secretary
>General Ricupero put it recently in Berlin, a "world parliament on
>globalization." But this should be a parliament with teeth, with
>actual legislative power and executive power in the nexus of trade,
>finance, development, and environment. It was under the aegis of
>UNCTAD that international agreements on stabilizing commodity
>prices and setting up a Common Fund to support countries suffering
>from price fluctuations for their exports were forged in the
>seventies. It was also negotiations carried out under the UNCTAD
>umbrella that led to the establishment of GSP's or preferential
>systems for Third World imports. This activist, decisionmaking
>role is one that UNCTAD must reclaim.
>
>There are many areas that demand UNCTAD intervention, but three
>in particular urgently demand broad global agreements:
>
>- There is a crying need for such an agreement on the "Special and
> Differential Treatment" that must be accorded to developing
> countries in global trade, investment, and finance. Such an
> agreement would specify both positive and negative measures to
> protect developing economies from the perils of indiscriminate
> liberalization, support their efforts to develop or industrialize
> through the use of trade and investment policy, and secure their
> preferential access to Northern markets. Such a UNCTAD-sponsored
> agreement would serve as overarching convention that would guide
> the actions of the WTO, IMF, European Union and all other major
> international economic actors.
>
>- UNCTAD could also play a key role in addressing the critical
> nexus of trade and environment. Together with the UN
> Environmental Programand UNDP, UNCTAD could lead in drafting an
> agreement specifying broad but binding guidelines and a
> pluralistic mechanism, involving civil society actors, that would
> judge on the conflicting claims of the WTO, multilateral
> environmental agreements, governments, and NGOs.
>
>- In light of the failure of the G-7 to seriously respond to the
> crying need for a reformed global financial , UNCTAD should seize
> leadership in this area and forge an agreement among its 180-plus
> member countries that would put such a system in place. Such a
> system could involve Tobin taxes, regional capital controls, and
> national capital controls, and a pluralistic set of regulatory
> institutions-innovations that are necessary for global financial
> stability but which are resisted by the banks, hedge funds, the
> IMF, and the US Treasury Department.
>
>- UNCTAD could also lead in forging a "New Deal" for agriculture in
> developing countries. The emphasis of such a convention would
> not be the integration of agriculture into world trade but the
> integration of trade into a development strategy that will put
> the emphasis on raising incomes and employment in the
> agricultural sector, achieving food security through a
> significant degree of food self-sufficiency, and promoting
> ecologically sustainable production
>
>UNCTAD in a Pluralistic System of Global Economic Governance
>
>All this is not to suggest replacing the WTO and the IMF with
>UNCTAD. But it does mean UNCTAD taking an active role in a
>process of reducing the powers of the WTO and the IMF.
>
>It is not surprising that both the WTO and IMF are currently mired
>in a severe crisis of legitimacy. Both are highly centralized,
>highly unaccountable, highly non-transparent global institutions
>that seek to subjugate, control, or harness vast swathes of global
>economic, social, political, and environmental processes to the
>needs and interests of a global minority of states, elites, and
>TNCs. The dynamics of such institutions clash with the burgeoning
>democratic aspirations of peoples, countries, and communities in
>both the North and the South. The centralizing thrust of these
>institutions clash with the efforts of communities and nations to
>regain control of their fate and achieve a modicum of security by
>deconcentrating and decentralizing economic and political power.
>In other words, these are Jurassic institutions in an age of
>participatory political and economic democracy.
>
>UNCTAD may not have the material resources of these institutions,
>but it has something that the billions of dollars of the World Bank
>and IMF could not buy: legitimacy among developing countries.
>
>A vigorous UNCTAD that competes in the process of defining global
>rules for trade, finance, investment, and sustainable development
>is essential in a pluralistic global economic regime where global
>institutions, organizations, and agreements complement as well as
>check one another. It is in such a more fluid, less structured,
>more pluralistic world with multiple checks and balances that the
>nations and communities of the South will be able to carve out the
>space to develop based on their values, their rhythms, and the
>strategies of their choice. UNCTAD has a critical contribution to
>make in the emergence of such a system of global governance.
>
> ..................................
>
> Dr. Walden Bello is professor of sociology and public
> administration at the University of the Philippines as well
> as the executive director of Focus on the Global South, a
> program of research, analysis, and advocacy based at the
> Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is the author or
> co-author of 10 books and numerous articles on global and
> Asian economics and politics, including Iron Cage: The WTO,
> the Bretton Woods Institutions, and the South (Bangkok:
> Focus on the Global South, 1999).
>
> "Walden Bello" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> http://www.focusweb.org/
>
>
> .............................................
> Bob Olsen, Toronto [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> .............................................
>
__________________________________
KOMINFORM
P.O. Box 66
00841 Helsinki - Finland
+358-40-7177941, fax +358-9-7591081
e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.kominf.pp.fi
___________________________________
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subscribe/unsubscribe messages
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___________________________________
