Watch out for the fireworks at Cancun

Rozi Ali, New Straits Times, Kuala Lumpur

Elsewhere, various non-governmental organizations have been mobilizing support to ensure that Cancun will not deliver new injustices and entrench inequity to the developing countries.

The anti-globalization signs have long mushroomed: "Cancun or Bust"; "Our world is not for sale"; and, as seen in Montreal on July 27, "WTO scum, your time has come".

Economist Jagdish Bhagwati warned that Cancun could well see history repeat itself, not as Doha but as Seattle.

Executive director of Forum for Global Justice Walden Bello stated that Cancun was shaping up as a confrontation between the old order and its challengers on the Left.

Because of its decision-making structure, based on "consensus" among all member countries, the WTO is shaping up as the weak link of the global capitalist system, much like Stalingrad was the weak link in the German lines during World War II.

For the establishment, the aim is to launch another ambitious round of trade liberalization in Cancun that would rival the Uruguay Round. For its opponents, the aim is to reverse globalization by turning Cancun into the Stalingrad of the globalist project.

Among the concerns expressed by civil society groups is that Cancun could mark the demise of multilateralism if the U.S. persists in its approach of picking trade partners on the basis of their political acquiescence.

America recently concluded free-trade agreements with Singapore and Chile and, according to reports, fasttrack negotiations are now under way with Bahrain, Morocco and Australia. The drift towards bilateralism is evident.

When Australian Prime Minister John Howard met President George W. Bush at the latter's Texas ranch, Bush advanced the date for concluding a deal from end-2004 to end-2003, while New Zealand was not accorded the same privilege. Similarly, negotiations with Egypt were terminated when it refused to join the U.S. in petitioning against the European Union's restrictions on biotechnology products.

The Washington-based publication Inside U.S. Trade quoted a top trade official suggesting that in the tense days before the war against Iraq, the Bush administration had "a long memory". This politicization of trade, irrespective of its supposed economic or welfare benefits, is worrying.

WTO members such as the EU, the U.S. and Japan are aiming at the granting of greater rights to transnational investors to hold themselves above national decisions on development priorities, macroeconomic policy, environmental directives and implementation of international human rights law.

This will kick away the development ladder by denying the developing countries the right to put the interest of their people before that of the transnational investors.

Without a strong regulatory framework, foreign direct investments will not contribute to sustainable development. Worse, this narrowing of governmental policy autonomy and liberation of investor protection may well bring on another round of social and economic disasters.

The attempt to introduce the negotiations on investment and the other Singapore issues (government procurement, competition policy and trade facilitation) in Cancun will be blocked by the developing countries.

But it remains to be seen whether they will mount a unified resistance or fall apart under the pressures in the Green Room. The call for a reform of the WTO may turn out to be a call in the wilderness if the solidarity of the developing countries is only manifested on paper and not in will-power and non-reactive strategy.