Cancun Round may only hasten end of unjust WTO

Anuradha Mittal, Co-Director, Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, Inter Press Service, Oakland

Between Sept. 10-14, 146 trade ministers from around the world will gather in the Mexican resort of Cancun for the next World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial, which is intended to "create fair global trade rules and redress the imbalances and inequities of the previous trade rounds".

But given the fact that WTO operations are plagued by the use of secret negotiations and the wielding of brute economic power by the U.S. and Europe, developing countries have little to look forward to.

The most contentious issue for the organization remains the Agreement on Agriculture. Market access for agricultural commodities --agriculture being the only area where developing countries might compete head-on with the industrialized nations-- was the carrot offered to the developing world to join the WTO. But the reality is that the WTO is structured to protect the interests of politically-influential corporate agriculture in rich countries like the U.S. at the expense of millions of poor farmers across the Third World.

Using its powerful influence on the World Bank, IMF, and international trade agreements, the U.S. has pressured poor countries to remove subsidies that favor local producers and to lower tariff charges on foreign imports while keeping its own subsidies intact. This, then, enables the U.S. to dump its cheap subsidized food into developing nations, ravaging the livelihoods of small farmers.

The numbers are alarming. The industrialized countries subsidize their agriculture to the tune of almost US$1 billion a day. The 2002 U.S. Farm Bill continues this trend, with taxpayers coughing up another $180 billion in new money over the next 10 years. Meanwhile, U.S. farm subsidies cost poor countries about $50 billion a year in lost agricultural exports -- ironically, an amount equal to the total of rich countries' aid to poor countries.

In effect, the WTO works like a Robin Hood in reverse: Robbing the world's poor to enrich American and European agribusiness. Whenever Third World governments have balked at U.S. and EU agricultural proposals, they met with threats to cut off preferential market access, suspend aid, and other sorts of arm- twisting.

With agriculture the key to the Cancun round, the U.S. and the EU cobbled together an agricultural deal that would over time eliminate subsidies on products of "particular interest" to poor countries. Presented as a "major breakthrough" in the stalled negotiations, the proposal is in truth far from that. It fails to phase out all forms of trade distorting agricultural subsidies as agreed upon in the Doha mandate. It allows the U.S. and the EU to maintain or increase domestic agricultural support by excluding "Green Box" subsidies from calculations. Moreover, the formula suggested for tariff reduction forces sharp cuts on developing countries while letting the EU and the U.S. off the hook.

The proposal also ignores the demand by developing countries to protect special products from dumping practices in order to ensure local food security and the livelihoods of small farmers. And the proposed special safeguard mechanism for developing countries is inadequate since it can only be used for certain products, while leaving the rest of the WTO machinery intact.

The truth is that the U.S.-EU agriculture proposal for Cancun was never intended to address the interests of the developing countries, despite the fact that they make up the majority of WTO membership. Rather, it was an attempt to bridge differences between the U.S. and the EU. And if the developing countries fail to resist U.S.-EU tactics in Cancun, they will once again find themselves short-changed by the rich minority.

Such criticism has galvanized round-the-clock talks in Geneva on cutting tariffs on industrial goods and on the TRIPS agreement to ensure access to medicines for developing countries -- all in the hope of moving agricultural negotiations forward in order to conclude the rest of the Doha round at the end of 2004. Clearly the WTO is getting desperate.

But the actions of the U.S. and EU will only further fuel resentment among the developing countries, as civil society's resistance to corporate-driven economic globalization spreads further and further throughout the world, accelerating the eventual demise of the WTO.