BY ZANNY BEGG
SYDNEY — Alan Wood, in his article "World's poor at the mercy of Europe" (Australian, November 12), argued that those protesting at the November 14-15 trade ministers' meeting sponsored by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) were denying developing countries the chance for future prosperity. This argument was repeated to me by Alan Oxley, a former senior Australian trade negotiator, when we debated the anti-WTO protests on the November 13 Sunrise program on Channel 7.
The WTO meeting in Sydney is part of a push to complete the Doha round of trade negotiations, which will be discussed at the fifth ministerial meeting of the WTO in Mexico next year. The main proposals on the table — regulating trade in agriculture and services and intellectual property rights — will not benefit the poor.
For the developing world, food security remains a crucial issue. More than 1.2 billion people in the world live on less than US$1 a day. The daily struggle to feed their families is a tussle with starvation. The elimination of trade barriers in agriculture for Third World countries will not alleviate this problem, but may worsen it. For this reason, countries such as Indonesia have opposed cuts in tariffs for agriculture.
The agricultural liberalisation that Indonesia has undertaken in recent years, due to its commitments to the International Monetary Fund and WTO, has led to an explosion of food imports of staple crops. Indonesia is now one of the world's top rice importers, importing at least 10% of its rice. Between 1995 and 2001, sugar imports have increased by 45% and soya imports by 40%.
Overnight, in a country where over 100 million people live in rural areas and the majority live by subsistence farming, the livelihoods of millions have been destroyed. This one example exposes the claim that lowering agricultural tariffs in developing countries will really benefit the poor to be a lies.
Oxley alleged that the WTO rules have underpinned the greatest rise in prosperity in human history. But how is this "prosperity" distributed? According to the United Nations Human Development Report 2000, the combined wealth of the world's 200 richest people hit $1 trillion in 2000; the combined incomes of the 582 million people living in the 43 least developed countries is $146 billion.
Most people have lost out under the trade system imposed by the WTO. Economic growth, and almost all of the other social indicators, for the last 20 years have shown a clear decline in Third World progress as compared with the previous two decades. Every indicator — literacy, life expectancy, economic growth rates — has worsened for the world's majority.
The issue at Homebush is not protectionism, as Oxley alleges, but the rich-country governments' hypocrisy. Demonstrators will not be calling for tariffs but protesting against a trade system which allows the rich countries to protect their markets — through subsidies and tariffs — while they squeeze concessions from the already struggling economies of the Third World.
To argue that more trade is the answer to ending poverty is like arguing that cigarettes are the cure for lung cancer. The WTO organises the system of trade we live under now and even its own report on poverty (released June 2000) admits that its policies have led to job losses for the poor. Will more of the same get us out of this mess? Or, as the banners at the November 13-15 demonstrations asked, is another world possible?
Despite all the media sensationalism that followed the anti-WTO protests, their political message was not lost. In 1999, tens of thousands of demonstrators outside the Seattle meeting of the WTO, combined with a revolt by Third World delegates inside the meeting, caused it to fail. Now known as the "Battle for Seattle", it led to the collapse of that trade round. This was the movement's victory that Sydney meeting wa's trying to unwind.
What is at stake is the future of how the world lives. Can we continue with a world trade system in which the three richest individuals have a combined income greater then the GDP of the world's poorest 148 countries? It is time we changed the rules of the game.
[Zanny Begg is an activist with the No WTO group.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 20, 2002.
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