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WTO-CANCUN/TRADE-ASIA - Convert Conference into Battlefield
Mon Sep 1 14:19:13 2003
64.140.158.35

WTO-CANCUN/TRADE-ASIA:
Activists Want to Convert Conference into Battlefield
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=19748

Marwaan Macan-Markar


BANGKOK, Aug 20 (IPS) - Asian activists have set their
sights on converting next month's World Trade
Organisation (WTO) meeting into a battlefield with a
single aim in mind: destroying the relevance of this
multilateral trade body.

For weapons, they will bring their newly sharpened
ideas and razor-edged messages on why the Geneva-based
WTO ''should be got rid of'' or ''pushed back''.

This rage about the Fifth WTO Ministerial Conference
to be held in the Mexican resort city of Cancun from
Sep. 10-14 is being felt across activists' and
critics' circles across East Asia, and reflected
during a two-day meeting here.

Those representing non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) in Asia's industrial powerhouse, Japan, are as
livid about the debilitating impact that the WTO's
free trade agenda is having on people across the
region as are activists from poverty-stricken
Cambodia.

''It would be a victory on our side if this
ministerial meeting gets nowhere and creates a retreat
of the WTO,'' Walden Bello, head of the Bangkok-based
regional think tank Focus on the Global South, told
the assembled activists on Wednesday.

''The WTO cannot be reformed. It must be destroyed by
the people's movement,'' added Choi Yung-Chan of All
Together, a Seoul-based NGO that is championing
an anti-capitalist and anti-war movement in South
Korea. ''We will be sending 206 people to Cancun to
achieve a victory for the people.''

As the activists see it, there is little that Asia's
developing countries stand to gain from the four main
issues that are expected to dominate the discussions
among trade ministers from the WTO's 146 member
countries, aimed at negotiating to further liberalise
global trade.

Among these four contentious issues are the setting of
international trading rules for agriculture products,
an agreement on the Trade Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and its impact on
easy access to cheap medicines in the developing world
and discussions on enforcing cuts in industrial
tariffs.

The activists are also not falling for rosy accounts
of the WTO's significance to improving trade across
Asia being advanced by the eight-year-old multilateral

body's first Asian chief, Supachai Panitchpakdi,
former deputy prime minister of Thailand.

Last week, the WTO director-general talked up the
potential his organisation offered countries in the
developing world to accompany the release of the
'World Trade Report', which stated that Asia's volume
of international trade towered over trade figures from
other regions in the South.

''A lot of developing countries who supported Supachai
get the top post are disappointed by him, '' Kingkorn
Navintarakul, advisor to the Chiang Mai-based Northern

Peasants Federation of Thailand, told IPS. '' He has
been unable to affect real change and to make the WTO
a place where developing countries can get a fair deal

for trade.''

Such pessimism about the forthcoming round of
international trade negotiations is not misplaced,
says Aileen Kwa, author of the book 'Power Politics
and the WTO'. ''There is no reason to have illusions
that things will get better.''

On agriculture issues, for instance, most Asian
countries are troubled by the way the U.S. and
European Union farm sectors will stand to make
significant gains if the Cancun meeting endorses an
agriculture agreement promoting the liberalisation of
farm trade.

''It will not help the farmers in Asia's developing
countries, thus affecting their livelihoods and their
country's food security,'' Kwa, who has been following
the trade negotiations at the WTO's headquarters, told
IPS.

''Cheap farm products from the EU and the U.S. will be
dumped in Asia, where countries will have to drop any
protective barriers for their farmers. Meanwhile, the
EU and the U.S. will be able to get away protecting
their own farmers,'' she said.

In the Philippines, activists have gathered evidence
in agricultural sectors such as rice, corn and animal
farming to amplify Kwa's view that a grim harvest
awaits more Asian countries if the agriculture
agreement, which they say is weighted heavily in
favour of the United States and the EU, is endorsed
in Cancun.

The distortions and inequity created by the
agricultural subsidies given by industrialised
countries have been singled out in reports like
United Nations Development Programme's 'Human
Development Report 2003'.

''Rich countries, to varying degrees, pay large
subsidies to their domestic food producers. These
subsides are so large - totalling 311 billion U.S.
dollars a year - that they affect world market prices
of agriculture goods, causing direct harm to poor
countries,'' states the U.N. report.

There have been attempts by both European and U.S.
governments to show plans to reduce the subsidies.

Still, critics say, these subsidies stand in direct
contrast to what the industrialised nations promised
developing nations at the last WTO ministerial
meeting, held in Dohar, Qatar, in 2001 - to eliminate
subsidies for farm products as a way of making the
global trade rules fairer to the developing world.

Asia's poor, who were promised access to cheaper drugs
at the Doha meeting, are also suspicious about the
WTO, says Heather Grady, regional director of the
East Asia office of the humanitarian agency Oxfam.

''The Doha agreement was to increase people's access
to cheaper medicines, but there has been a rollback
since then,'' she said.

She was referring to how all the big talk in Doha
about public health being a reason to override
intellectual property and patent concerns - a key
plank of the WTO regime -- has not led to concrete
agreement among governments despite several rounds of
mini-summits on this issue.

Most worrying, she said in an interview, are the
conditions that the WTO has placed on Cambodia in its
bid to become a member. This South-east Asian
country's admission into the trade body at the Cancun
meeting would make it the first Least Developed
Country (LDC) to become a member after the WTO was
formed.

''It is a country that needs cheap, generic anti-AIDS
drugs to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS. But Cambodia
will have to give up depending on generic drugs almost

immediately it becomes a WTO member, due to new
conditions being imposed about TRIPS,'' adds Grady.

''This is outrageous,'' she says. ''The case of
Cambodia exemplifies an institution that favours the
powerful.''

According to Bello, these clear contradictions lend
weight to activists' efforts to nail down the WTO as a
failure. ''We need to push back this form of false
multilateralism advocated by U.S. capital, and create
a new open space for an alternative multilateralism.''
(END/2003)
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