TWO WINNERS, ONE LOSER AT SMC

7:39 AM Dec 13, 1996

TWO WINNERS, ONE LOSER AT SMC
Singapore 13 Dec (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- The first Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization ended here early afternoon with the adoption of a Ministerial Declaration.

The Ministers and assembled delegates did not even have a final official copy of the Declaration in their hands, when the Conference was closed at 12.50 local time (0450 GMT).

At the informal HOD meeting, just before the official final plenary, some 2-1/2 lines of text were added, asking the General Council to consider how the forthcoming 50th anniversary of the multilateral system is to be observed. And there was not enough time to incorporate these and run a new final text for distribution to all delegates!

Delegates will have a limited number of copies in 15 minutes, it was announced, and many copies after 3 hours. And those who would have reservations would give them in writing and to be put into the official records, the Chairman announced.

His closing remarks, in the final open plenary, made specific references to the Declaration's para on labour standards and gave a public assurance that the text would not lead to the WTO, acquiring competence to undertake further work in the relationship between trade and core labour standards.

If the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations ended at Marrakesh with some winners and many losers, the first Ministerial encounter, after nearly two years in the life of the WTO, has thus ended after five days of intense, and totally non-transparent negotiations, with two winners and a loser.

The entire negotiations was among some 30 delegations (with a minister and advisor for each). The other delegations did not know what was going on, and at the Thursday night informal HOD, a number of countries, some small and some medium trading countries, openly complained.

Singapore Trade Minister and SMC Chair, Yeo Cheow Tong and WTO head, Renato Ruggiero, made some apologies and said they would try to evolve a process that could be more transparent and efficient.

When Mr. Ruggiero took office in May 1995, he announced as one of his tasks and objectives, bringing greater transparency into the WTO. That 19 months later, so many countries were complaining of lack of transparency, and Ruggiero could only promise some new method which his spokesman said, was still to be worked out, is an interesting side-story to the problems that the WTO faces.

The first winner, as a result of this meeting, is the Industrial world, with the European Union and the United States among them leading the pack, in establishing a new Imperialism to further their neo-mercantalist interests.

The second winner, is the host country, Singapore, which managed to get the Conference to end with a consensus Declaration, and achieved its objective of positioning itself as an international conference centre, as a facilitator and an entry-point, if not a bridgehead, into the emerging markets of Asia and the developing world.

The loser, is the developing world, individually and collectively.

Looked at from another perspective, shorn of the cliches of the econocrats and the WTO functionaries, the transnational traders, the Fortune 500 and their prosperity under globalization have been assured, and the majority of the populations of the world lost:

Nothing emerging from this meeting will address the problems of marginalization of the majority of the world's population nor assure equity and justice for the poor, under the system.

There may be arguments whether in fact, the North and the host country are winners in a long-term perspective -- for there can be no enduring prosperity for a few surrounded by growing poverty for the many. Also, the WTO system is inherently asymmetric and hence, unstable in a world of slow or sluggish growth. And 15 years of the neo-liberal tide is showing signs of ebb.

But there can be no arguments that the developing world as a whole, not only did not gain anything here, but again lost -- all its problems have been brushed under the carpet, as at the end of earlier GATT rounds of 'trade negotiations', where even before their commitments could be implemented, the majors made new demands on the developing world, and got them.

The governments of the developing countries, as guardians of their people's interests, cannot escape their share of individual and collective responsibility for this outcome -- because of their continued disunity and lack of coordination, and the attempts to pursue the narrow trading interests of its big traders (and transnational affiliates).

Their brave words, including at levels of heads of state or government at recent conclaves, their joint positions at Geneva and elsewhere, on some of the new issues, all crumbled here, with one after the other yielding to the pressures of the US, the EC and the WTO head in the small negotiating conclaves, and last one or two holdouts unwilling to be publicly blamed for the failure of the Singapore Conference.

The damage done to their slow attempts to build a united front, as a result of a change of stance on key questions, without prior notice or consultation, is going to take much time, when time is not on their side. Who caved in first and who last, is not very relevant to the outcomes, but will, if negotiators and diplomats of the South have to pick the pieces and rebuild.

But a larger share of the responsibility for neglect of the implementation problems and concerns of the developing world, must lie with the WTO head, Mr. Renato Ruggiero, and the host country.

Mr Ruggiero (the former EC functionary, Italian Trade Minister, and, then a FIAT executive), brought his own 'agenda' to the office (and proudly proclaimed it in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal), and has been promoting it, while cris-crossing the world in 18 months of travels -- from Auckland to Vancouver, from Buenos Aires to Seoul and Tokyo, and more frequently, to Washington and Brussels, and also the host country. The Ruggiero agenda coincided with the agendas of the US and the EC, though Ruggiero has been telling diplomats that he sincerely believes in them.

The host country, in its efforts to ensure a successful Conference, with a 'political message in a Declaration', found itself forced to be more aware of and sensitive to the 'needs' of the US and EC and how to accommodate them for a successful outcome, and used all its 'cards' to get the ASEAN, other Asians, and Africans to compromise.

The result was that five days of meetings and 'negotiations' and 'plurilateral consultations', with negotiators getting less than five hours of sleep every day, have been devoted to the agendas of the EC and the US -- investment, competition policy, government procurement, and labour standards.

None of the several scores of issues troubling developing countries received any attention. They were just brushed aside - and reflect no more than the innocuous conclusions in the reports of the WTO bodies.

All the preparatory process, and the attention here, has been on the 'new issues' brought up by the US and EC and how to accommodate them. And accommodate them, the SMC did, with some 'comforting language' that the developing countries can use, to argue back home that their concerns have been met.

The much promoted Ruggiero talk of 'integrating' the least developed countries into the global economy, through an Action Plan for duty-free access to their exports was brought up in the closed consultations at the end, by EC Trade Commissioner Leon Brittan, with the US expressing its inability to accept it because of the legal situation and lack of Congressional authority.

And the LDCs, the poorest of the world's poor, have no more than a plan of action that at best, hopes for 'best endeavour' by the developed countries, and the more advanced of the developing countries, to provide greater and duty-free access, as an autonomous process. This, like the old GSP or the Lome Preferences, is unlikely to help the LDCs to achieve structural changes and ensure productive capacity.

There is just the promise of a 1997 meeting, with UNCTAD, International Trade Centre and aid agencies and multilateral financial institutions and LDCs, to foster an 'integrated approach' to assist these countries to enhance their trading opportunities.

In the code language of the 'aid' agencies, 'integrated' does not encompass additional aid!

This was known from the time the US Congress adopted the Uruguay Round Implementation Act, and the American negotiators have made no secret of it. For the issue to be brought up at the tail end may enable Brittan and Ruggiero to contend that they had done their best, but can carry no conviction to the outside public, despite the 'spin' that may be put on it by the battery of public relations officers and press spokesmen.

In 1982, the veteran Representative of Brazil to GATT, Amb. George Maciel, remarked that GATT was too serious a business to be left to Ministers. He was not being anti-democratic, but taking note of the technicalities and complexities (and the inter-connections) of rules in different areas, and the fact that developing country Ministers and even their capital-level bureaucrats, are not fully equipped to understand and negotiate with their 'peers' in the North - even if they get a chance to negotiate.

At Singapore too, developing country Ministers were no match when facing the combined phalanx of the US and European Commission Ministers and the WTO head.

This first Ministerial Conference of the WTO has also brought home that the built-in asymmetry and non-transparency of the old GATT system has, if anything, been accentuated and enhanced in the two-year old 'rule-based' WTO system, and that the interests and concerns of the developing world is receiving, and will receive, even less attention than under the old GATT.

This feeling was shared by many delegates and developing country Ministers, (who have spent money and travelled long distances to be here - only to be shut out of any meaningful participation, decision-making), observers and the 'civil society'.

Ministers from the developing world, who had meetings here with their NGOs, confessed to a feeling of helplessness and in total ignorance as to what was going on. Some of the NGOs, were shocked to find that their Ministers and officials knew even less than some of the NGOs and some of the media persons. Several of the NGOs, who met with their ministers, were shocked to realise the situation of their ministers and trade officials.

The unjust, inequitous and asymmetric WTO system and institution was brought home to the NGOs, as never before.

And while their ministers and officials are going back home, putting on a brave face and announcing how their concerns have been met, the NGOs and national media personnel (even in countries where the media is controlled) strengthened in their understanding of the reality of the WTO: an instrument of global governance on behalf of the industrial world, and potentially, a very destabilizing factor of the international system (as the UNCTAD Secretary-General put it) or the instrument of the New Transnational Imperialism, as the NGOs see it.

At an eve-of-Conference NGO forum Thursday night, developing and developed country NGOs were clear that the WTO, with its non-transparency and secrecy was an undemocratic and 'illegitimate' institution, intruding into people's lives. As such, several of the speakers said, aside from their individual agendas and focus, all of them had to focus on the WTO as an 'illegitimate' institution of governance and an institution promoting the interests of the North and its corporations.