WTO’s 14th November
Draft Launches New Round: Returning Stolen Peanuts While
Extracting the Last Pound of Flesh
Focus on the Global South, 14 November
Focus supports calls on Southern governments to reject the
deal currently presented to them. The reworked draft which
emerged in the early morning of 14 November in Doha
essentially launches a New Round of trade negotiations.
It agrees to the commencing of new negotiations in the
controversial issues of investment and competition which the
majority of developing countries have already rejected. The
exact wording in investment and competition is that
`negotiations will take place after the 5th Session of the
Ministerial Conference on the basis of a decision to be taken
by explicit consensus, at that Session on the modalities of
negotiations’.
Already, the process of negotiations leading up to Doha and in
Doha has revealed that developing countries views are totally
ignored. India has likened a potential investment agreement
would be as devastating effects as the present TRIPS
agreement. However, developing countries’ protests are being
silenced through outright stonewalling, or strong armed
tactics. If governments today agree to this draft, they will
essentially be signing on to a broad comprehensive round which
commences now and becomes full fledged by the 5th Ministerial.
The same dirty tactics will no doubt also continue, to
manufacture the `consensus’ mentioned, by that time.
The 14th November text also explicitly calls for the immediate
initiation of negotiations on industrial tariffs, transparency
in government procurement and trade facilitation. Already many
African countries, have pointed to examples of how their
economies have been bombed back into the stone-ages because of
deindustrialisation as a result of overly rapid tariff
liberalisation. The WTO again ignores these realities.
Transparency in government procurement is also the first step
towards market access in government procurement. This will
further pit local goods and service providers with
multinationals, to the detriment of the former.
On Implementation issues, even after years of lobbying for
this to be the most important priority issue for developing
countries as a block, the package now offered is of little
trade value. The most important issues to developing countries
- such as TRIPS and the questions of patents over life and
biopiracy - continue to be put on an agenda for future
consideration. Language on anti-dumping remains weak.
The Declaration also makes no mention of developing countries’
calls for a Development Box to be introduced in the
Agriculture Agreement, to take into account the critical
concerns of the livelihoods of small farmers and the need to
increase domestic food production to increase food security.
Ministers of the `Friends of Development Box’ had met in Doha
this week, to renew this call. Many small farmers in
developing countries have or are in the process of finding
their livelihoods decimated by the surge of dumped food
imports into their countries. The agriculture text is
extremely weak on addressing this issue of subsidisation and
export dumping OECD countries - primarily the EU and US are
engaged in. Only export subsidies is mention, and even then,
this latest draft has weakened language. Other forms of
domestic supports which essentially lead to dumping are given
scant mention.
The WTO is claiming to deal with concerns of the poor by
giving developing countries a Declaration on TRIPS and Public
Health. However, the exact language in the Declaration is weak
saying that governments `can’ and `should’ be able to take
measures needed to address public health concerns. This
replaced the formulation by developing countries, which used
the much stronger word `shall’. This compromise also leaves
unchanged the language of the TRIPS agreement, which will
serve as the basis for future legal challenges to countries
that override patents for public health purposes.
In sum, the draft text appears to give some peanuts to
developing countries (which in the first place had been stolen
from them in the previous round), but in return, is extracting
the last pound of flesh that could be gotten from them. This
deal would be disastrous for the development of countries in
the South. We call on developing country governments to reject
the draft.
Aileen Kwa
Walden Bello
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