-Caveat Lector- Dave Hartley http://www.Asheville-Computer.com/dave The following article was published in International Herald Tribune 21 Dec 1999 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Paris, Tuesday, December 21, 1999 Take Care, the WTO Majority Is Tired of Being Manipulated -------------------------------------------------------------------- By Martin Khor International Herald Tribune -------------------------------------------------------------------- PENANG, Malaysia - The World Trade Organization was prevented in Seattle from agreeing on a new round of global negotiations to expand trade liberalization because of divisions among the United States, the European Union and Japan, as well as between rich and poor nations. But the more basic cause of the Seattle failure was the untransparent nature of the WTO system, its blatant manipulation by the major powers. The seeds of the North-South battle were sown in Geneva in the weeks before Seattle. Developing countries voiced disappointment that five years after the WTO's creation they had not seen promised benefits. They put forward dozens of proposals, including changing some of the rules. Most of their demands were dismissed. The major economies pushed instead their own proposals to further empower the WTO by introducing new areas such as investment, competition, government procurement, and labor and environmental standards. Developing countries in general opposed these new issues, which would open up their markets more widely to the rich nations' big companies, or would give these rich states new protectionist tools. Worse still, the WTO secretariat was used by the major powers to engage in untransparent procedures, such as holding informal meetings on crucial issues in small groups to which most developing countries were not invited. These so-called ''Green Room'' meetings infuriated the Third World members of the WTO, who form a large majority of its 135 participating countries. At Seattle, the U.S. trade representative, Charlene Barshefsky, presided over an undemocratic process. She announced on the second day her ''right'' as chairman to use procedures of her own choosing to get a declaration out of the meeting. She and the WTO director-general, Mike Moore, set up several Green Room meetings on key issues of disagreement. Only 10 or 20 countries (the major powers plus a few selected developing countries) were invited to a typical Green Room meeting. The plan of the organizers was to get the major powers to agree among themselves, apply pressure in the Green Rooms on a few influential developing countries to go along, and then pull together a declaration to launch a new round that all members would be coerced to accept in a special meeting on the last day. The vast majority of developing countries were shut out of the whole Green Room process. They were not even informed which meetings were going on, or what was being discussed. Ministers and senior officials of most developing countries were left hanging around in the corridors or the canteen, trying to catch snippets of news or negotiating texts. Their anger boiled over on the third day of the conference. The African ministers issued a statement saying that there was ''no transparency,'' that African countries were generally excluded on issues vital to their future, and that they would not support a ministerial text produced without consensus. Similar statements were issued by the Caribbean Community ministers and by some Latin American countries. Ms. Barshefsky and Mr. Moore were thus faced with the prospect that if a draft declaration were presented at a final session, there would be an explosion of protests and a rejection by developing nations. That would totally expose to the public and the world media the manipulative methods by which the Seattle conference, and more seriously the WTO in general, had been run. In the end it was less embarrassing to decide to let the Seattle meeting collapse without attempting even a brief declaration. But Ms. Barshefsky was forced to admit thatthe WTO had outgrown what she called the processes appropriate to an earlier time. ''We needed a process which had a greater degree of internal transparency and inclusion to accommodate a larger and more diverse membership,'' she conceded. Do her concluding remarks give hope for reform of the WTO's decision-making system? That depends on whether the developing countries can now make use of the impasse to press for a democratic system. The big powers will try hard to cling to their privileges. Ms. Barshefsky and the European Union's trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy, announced that Mr. Moore had been given the authority to carry forward the Seattle process. Mr. Lamy said that Mr. Moore would report directly back to the ministers, implying that the post-Seattle negotiations would be led by the director-general rather than the WTO's General Council, the majority of whose members are developing countries. The writer, an economist, is director of the Third World Network, a group of nongovernmental organizations dealing with issues of development and the environment. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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