> But the focus of the Northern counteroffensive was the defanging,
>if not dismantling of UNCTAD. After giving in to the South during
>the UNCTAD IV negotiations in Nairobi in 1976 by agreeing to the
>creation of the commodity stabilization scheme known as the
>Integrated Program for Commodities, the North, during UNCTAD V in
>Belgrade, refused the South's program of debt forgiveness and
>other measures intended to revive Third World economies and thus
>contribute to global recovery at a time of worldwide recession.
>The northern offensive escalated during UNCTAD VIII, held in
>Cartagena in 1992. At this watershed meeting, the North
>successfully opposed all linkages of UNCTAD discussions with the
>Uruguay Round negotiations of the GATT and managed to erode
>UNCTAD's negotiation functions, thus calling its existence into
>question.
>
> This drastic curtailing of UNCTAD's scope was apparently not
>enough for certain Northern interests. For instance, the Geneva-based
>Independent Commission on Global Governance identified UNCTAD as one
>of agencies that could be abolished in order to streamline the UN
>system. The Commission's views apparently coincided with that of Karl
>Theodor Paschke, head of the newly created UN Office of Internal
>Oversight Services, who was quoted by Stern Magazine as saying that
>UNCTAD had been made obsolete by the creation of the World Trade
>Organization.
>
> UNCTAD on the Defensive
>
>During UNCTAD VIII, the North pushed to limit UNCTAD's function's
>to 'analysis, consensus building on some trade related issues, and
>technical assistance.' But even in this limited role, UNCTAD
>managed during the late eighties and nineties to perform
>indispensable tasks for the South. Among other things, UNCTAD's
>research and analytical work: showed that structural adjustment
>was leading to stagnation, not to the promised growth path
>promised by the World Bank and the IMF; underlined the crippling
>debt overhang that made any development 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 'persistent 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 adminisration
>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).
>
> Notes
>
> See, among other works, A New Trade Policy for Development (NY:
>UNCTAD, 1964). Bernard Nossiter, The Global Struggle for More (New
>York: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 42-43. Ibid., p. 45. Alfred
>Maizels, �Reforming the World Commodity Economy,� in Michael
>Cutajar, ed., UNCTAD and the North-South Dialogue (New York:
>Pergamon Press, 1985, p. 108; United Nations, World Economic
>Survey (New York: United Nations, 1988), p. 42 Doug Bandow, �The
>US Role in Promoting Third World Development,� in Heritage
>Foundation, US Aid to the Developing World: A Free Market Agenda
>(Washington: Heritage Foundation, 1985), p. xxii. Ibid., p. xxiv
>Ibid., pp. Xxiii-xxiv. Adams, p. 43. South Commission, The
>Challenge to the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),
>
>p. 217. Myriam Van der Stichele, 'World Trade' Free Trade for Whom,
>Fair for Whom?,' in Childers, p. 69. 'South Decries Moves to Close
>UNCTAD, UNIDO,' Third World Resurgence, No. 56, p. 41. Ibid. Ibid.
>Quoted in UNCTAD X-�World Parliament on Globalization?', SUNS, No.
>4584, Jan. 14, 2000. Ninth Ministerial Meeting of the Group of 77 and
>China, 'Draft Bangkok Consensus,' Marrakech, Morocco, Sept.13-16,
>1999. Quoted in �UNCTAD X- 'World Parliament on Globalization?',
>SUNS, No. 4584, Jan. 14, 2000. " JC
>
>
>
>
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