The WTO parley
We expect bouts of vigorous discourses during the week-long first ministerial meeting of the Geneva-based World Trade Organization (WTO) beginning in Singapore today. After all, the gathering trade ministers represent 125 countries which, although sharing the same objective of enhancing free and open trade, are in widely differing stages of economic development and consequently, with strikingly varying competitive capacity. However, warning signs are flashing that unless the ministers share a set of pragmatic priorities, the greatly important gathering risks degenerating into a huffing and puffing parley.
The persistence of the big-power policymakers, notably the United States and European Union, to bring in an overambitious agenda to the talks could lead into another bout of fruitless confrontation between developed and developing nations. It should be realized that for the developing countries to accept what has been stipulated in the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is already an uphill challenge. The GATT is like a game field, with the same legally binding rules for all players, irrespective of their classes.
The developing nations are still working to fulfill what they have committed themselves to under the new global trade rules, and are obviously not yet prepared to take part in new kinds of matches. Forcing them into new games such as the competition policy, common investment rules and common labor standards would jeopardize the next ministerial meeting, which will convene two years from now, or might kill the possibility for the next round of global trade negotiations sometime in the 21st century.
The built-in agenda agreed upon in the Marrakesh treaty, which concluded the Uruguay Round of global trade negotiations and led into the 1994 GATT, is already daunting enough. The agenda, for example, includes future negotiations on agricultural trade and services. Adding new issues to the agenda, especially the ones seemingly unrelated to trade, risks overloading the forum. If the big-power economies continue to push with their misplaced ambitions, they are bound to create suspicions among the developing nations of any further deals which are surely needed to complete the rules of the global trade game.
In fact, some seeds of suspicion were planted during the Uruguay Round of negotiations from 1986 to 1993. Many developing nations now realize they had been tricked into accepting the inclusion of trade in services and intellectual property rights in the agenda. The two issues were initially discussed only at the level of working committees, but they somehow eventually moved onto the negotiating table. Now the European Union and the U.S. apparently want to play a similar trick, suggesting that the WTO simply endorse a study on a multilateral investment treaty, the relationships between trade and competition policy and the links between trade and labor standards.
Given the importance of maintaining the momentum for free trade, it is much wiser for the Singapore meeting to focus on the built-in agenda already agreed to at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of negotiations, including the review of how the commitments to tariff cuts and the removal of non-tariff barriers are being honored. The other agenda already in the pipeline -- such as the coming negotiations on trade in services and farm products and the ongoing talks on telecommunications -- are already ambitious enough, insofar as the resources and domestic conditions of the developing nations are concerned.
It is true that most of the new issues brought up by the big powers amount to the further development of a level playing field in the global trade game, transparency in business rules and most-favored nation treatment. But the developing nations, as the smallest, weakest players in the game, need some time before they are able to match the classes of the big players. How could the developing nations -- which in terms of boxing, fit only into the feather and middleweight classes -- be forced to fight the heavyweight ones in the same ring?