Contents
Introduction
Mini-glossary
1. The WTO: from Marrakech to Hong Kong
1.1. Looking back
1.2. The Doha negotiation programme
2. Agricultural negotiations
3. Opening of the markets to non-agricultural products
4. Implementing the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services)
5. Other issues
5.1. Intellectual property rights (TRIPS - Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights)
5.2. The cotton issue
6. Outlook for the Hong Kong ministerial conference
6.1. WTO ministerial conferences
6.2. Hong Kong: a new Cancun or a step forward for the Doha programme?
7. The position of the GUE/NGL Group on the WTO negotiations
Conclusion
Introduction
by Francis Wurtz, President of the “European United Left/Nordic Green Left" Group in the European Parliament
Hong Kong, a better understanding for better action
The European United Left/Nordic Green Left Group in the European Parliament has not missed a single alter-globalisation meeting on the WTO since Seattle in 1999. Needless to say, the Group will be in Hong Kong for the WTO Ministerial Conference in December. To closely follow the preparations for the meeting and better contribute to clarifying the issues at stake for European citizens, we felt it useful notably to go to Geneva from October 17 to 20 last, before the Hong Kong Conference. We met WTO leaders, representatives from developing countries, social bodies and the main NGOs that were present there. In this brochure, we are presenting a summary of the conclusions of these consultations as a whole. With just a few weeks to go before Hong Kong, we wanted it to be informative, accessible and geared towards a responsible intervention in a debate whose terms are currently caricaturised by the European authorities.
In the summary of its “priorities” for the end of the year, the Union’s British presidency does not hesitate to present sustained free-trade pressure as a sign of its determination to work “for results”, which is a sham: ten years of the WTO have not made the world more just, but more unequal.”Those in the most need are in fact those who are losing most,” noted Carine Smaller of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy with considerable pertinence. In reality, this reference to “development” (implied: thanks to free trade) is intended more than anything else to thwart a common position on the part of the Southern countries - some of which are counting heavily on exports while others quite simply have nothing to sell - faced with the United States and European Union. The objectives: to avoid a new defeat such as Seattle and Cancun at any cost; to finally secure the opening up of the most promising markets for major industrial and services groups.
The tragedies of Lampedusa, Ceuta and Melilla chilled the blood of European public opinion and confirmed the urgent need for a thorough reorientation of economic relations between the European Union and the Southern countries. Instead of locking itself into the search for a compromise of power with the United States, the EU would play its real role - that of a world player of a new type - by working for a sustainable alliance with the Southern countries that are looking for it to allow new rules in international relations to emerge, rules of increased solidarity, democracy and responsibility.
Such an alliance in no way involves sacrificing the legitimate interests of European people, in my opinion! For example, it is fair and necessary to defend real European agriculture for small farmers; the right to guaranteed prices that ensure their livelihood; the principle of “food sovereignty”, and respect for the “multi-functional” character - social, environmental, territorial- of agriculture.
What must be fought is “productionism” - of which farmers are the main victims; the practice of dumping that destabilises fragile Southern economies and increases their dependence; and the choice of rampant liberalisation that strives to open access to land, seeds, water as well as markets and services for major multinational groups!
Our Group feels the need to both broaden and deepen the political debate about what is taking place for the future of our society and the world in this particularly opaque planetary haggling. The ambition of this brochure is to make a contribution to this debate, if only modestly. We do not claim to have an answer to every question nor hold THE truth, but we hope it will help stimulate debate, reflection and action.
Mini-glossary
ACP: the countries of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Organi-piracy: a patent based not on an invention (involving the application of human creativity), but a discovery (learning about something that already exists). For example: patenting a plant variety as it shows curative or nutritional benefits, without having brought any genetic modifications that justify the patent.
Tariff peaks: relatively high customs duties usually applied to a “sensitive” product, in a context where customs duties are quite low.
FIPs: “Five Interested Parties”, namely the five parties with the greatest interest in the issue of trade in agricultural products: the group was the brainchild of the European Union, the United States and Australia and was designed to lure the other two members - India and Brazil - away from the coalitions to which they still belong.
G10: a group of ten countries that are net importers of agricultural products, comprising Bulgaria, Iceland, Israel, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Liechtenstein, Mauritius, Norway, Switzerland and China-Taiwan.
G20: a group of 20 countries created on the eve of the Cancun conference with a view to ensuring that an agreement previously concluded by the European Union and the United States, an agreement that disregarded the interests of those 20 countries, was not enshrined as a WTO rule and to preserve the scope for agricultural negotiations that would take due account of these countries’ concerns; the G20 countries are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Under pressure from the USA, Guatemala withdrew from the group. Brazil and India are considered the leaders of this group that mostly brings together emerging countries.
G33: initially a group of 33 countries that now totals 42. They are mostly countries under development that are primarily concerned by the impact of liberalisation on smaller peasant farmers: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Botswana, China, Congo, South Korea, Ivory Coast, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Saint-Kitts-and-Nevis, Saint-Lucia, Saint-Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uganda, Venezuela, Zambia, Zimbabwe. These countries are mainly concerned that the specificity of their respective situations be taken into account and oppose all blanket formulae.
G90: brings together countries that subscribe to the ACP, PMA and African groups. It strives to find and promote common ground within these three groups. It wants to protect the flexibility foreseen in the Marrakech Agreements and in particular the special and differentiated treatment.
LDCs: Least Developed Countries: these are the least-developed countries, those which are classified by the UNDP as the world’s poorest countries.
The Cairns Group: countries exporting agricultural products whose governments grant neither domestic support nor export subsidies: South Africa, Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Fiji Islands, Guatemala, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Philippines, Thailand, Uruguay.
The Green Box: measures of support for agricultural production that are considered not to distort trade and are therefore authorised without restriction.
The Blue Box: support measures related to agricultural production which are authorised subject to observance of production limits and which therefore have only a minimal distortion effect on trade.
The Amber Box: support measures for agricultural production that are regarded as distorting trade and are therefore subject to reduction commitments.
1. The WTO: from Marrakech to Hong Kong
1. Background
– In 1994, 123 governments signed the Marrakech Agreements. These agreements established the World Trade Organization (WTO) as the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), vesting it with considerable powers that made it the most powerful international institution in the world. In a number of areas, such as agriculture, services and intellectual-property rights, the agreements contained provisions which related only indirectly to trade but which empowered the WTO to intervene in all acts of everyday life. As the Western governments had intended, this was the green light for neo-liberal globalisation.
– In 1995, the Marrakech Agreements entered into force after ratification by the national parliaments.
– In 1996, the industrialised countries called for the opening of a new round of negotiations with a view to liberalising practices relating to investment, public contracts, competition and trade facilitation. At the WTO ministerial conference in Singapore, the developing countries opposed this move.
– In 1999, the wealthy countries sought to launch an extremely ambitious round of negotiations, dubbed the Millennium Round. At the WTO ministerial conference in Seattle, the developing countries refused to back this proposal. The commitment made to examine the incidence of the results of the Marrakech Agreements on the least-developed countries and those in development were not respected.
– In 2001, using methods contrary to the WTO rules and exploiting the situation in the aftermath of 11 September, the industrialised countries managed, at the WTO ministerial conference in Doha, to impose their desire to launch a round of negotiations that they christened the Doha Development Agenda. The topics rejected in Singapore were high on this agenda. More than ever, the WTO appears to be an institution where relationships of power prevail over the rule of law.
– From 2001 to 2003, the negotiations on the Doha agenda stalled on every topic: those that interested the developing countries were blocked because the wealthy countries were unwilling to meet the expectations of the South, and those that interested rich countries were blocked because the developing countries objected to the protectionism of the North.
– In 2003, with none of the deadlocks broken, the ministerial conference in Cancun ended in failure.
– In 2004, having succeeded in dividing the developing countries, the wealthy nations obtained an agreement at a meeting of the General Council of the WTO in July - a body comprising the Members’ ambassadors and vested with powers equivalent to those of the ministerial conference (government ministers may also attend General Council meetings if they so wish) - on a framework for the relaunching of the negotiations. This ‘July package’ essentially focused on four areas: agriculture, non-agricultural market access (NAMA), services and development issues. The aim was to achieve ‘approximation’ in these four areas within one year, in other words to arrive at an agreement reflecting the closest possible convergence of positions.
– In July 2005, the agreement was not reached, as the western demands were not balanced by efforts of the same importance that would in turn be favourable to developing countries.
1.2. The Doha negotiation programme: anything but development
On November 14, 2001, the ministerial conference adopted six texts:
– a ministerial declaration that consists of a negotiation programme covering 21 subjects;
– a declaration about the Agreement on intellectual property rights and public health that deals with the question of access to medication;
– a series of decisions on 14 points that concern the implementation of existing agreements;
– a document concerning some prorogations foreseen by the Agreement on subsidies;
– a derogation granted to the countries of the European Union and the Africa-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) group for a number of tariff provisions contrary to WTO rules contained in the Cotonou agreement between the European Union and ACP countries;
– a derogation concerning a transitory regime applied by the European Union on banana imports.
For four years now, each of these documents has been the basis of negotiations that follow the same goal: accentuating free trade by imposing the opening up of markets. And, with the exception of intellectual property rights where the rich countries are dominant (97% of patents are registered in Western countries) and impose protectionist rules, the technique is the same: deregulation. We can never repeat often enough that contrary to popular belief, the WTO does not regulate world trade; it deregulates the activities of national, regional and local public bodies.
The declaration reaffirms its faith in the virtues of absolute free trade, a bona-fide dogma which, if implemented, would automatically lead to growth and development. Flowery statements about the struggle against poverty are being made one after the other recently also becoming the leitmotif of the institutions (World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the WTO) that have most contributed to the growth in poverty. And the text adds: “The majority of WTO Members are developing countries. We seek to place their needs and interests at the heart of the Work Programme adopted in this Declaration.”
Box
Who will benefit from the Doha programme?
“Will the developing countries be the main beneficiaries of an agreement?
William Cline of the major American think tank the Institute for International Economics, estimates developing countries’ share of the total profits of liberalisation at 20% against 80% for rich countries.”
Le Monde, 18 October 2005.
The programme’s main negotiation points
1. Agriculture: The Agricultural Agreement must be the most emblematic of the WTO agreements. It highlights with particular force their iniquity, imbalance and harmfulness. It imposes on most of the world’s population rules from which the rich countries are exonerated. It imposes on rich countries’ rural areas an agro-industrial model whose “performances” are exceptional in terms of the elimination of small farm holdings, job losses, environmental deterioration and health danger. This agreement is the very negation of the idea of peasant farming as contributing to sustainability, the absolute need to leave future generations a world that is at least as liveable as the one we inherited. It is the result of a compromise between the two economic super-powers - the European Union and the United States - that imposed it on the rest of the world. The goal of the Agricultural Agreement is not to guarantee accessible food of sufficient quality and quantity for everyone while ensuring a decent living for farmers. The goal was even less to ensure food sovereignty, the right of each people to choose its mode of access to food, including the right to choose what it accepts or refuses to import. The goal is to maximise agro-food trade to the exclusive profit of the agro-food industry.
We can see why developing countries have shown growing opposition to this Agricultural Agreement, as they are subjected to the arrival of increasing quantities of food products from Europe and the US on their markets that are sold at prices lower than, for example, local rice or wheat. Under their pressure, the ministers at Doha undertook “without prejudging the outcome of the negotiations, (...) to conduct comprehensive negotiations aimed at: substantial improvements in market access; reductions of, with a view to phasing out, all forms of export subsidies; and substantial reductions in trade-distorting domestic support. We agree that special and differential treatment for developing countries shall be an integral part of all elements of the negotiations and shall be embodied in the Schedules of concessions and commitments...” A date had been proposed for the achievements of these intentions. Upon the intervention of the European Union, it was removed and replaced by the expression “without prejudging the outcome of the negotiations”. The Doha programme declared that modalities for the new commitments should be determined by March 31, 2003. No agreement has yet been reached.
Box
« We often forget that the European Union, as the world’s greatest exporter of processed agricultural products, has very significant offensive interests.”»
Carlos Troyan, Ambassador of the European Union, Geneva, May 26 2005
2. The GATS. The implementation of the General Agreement on the Trade in Services (GATS) has been the subject of successive negotiations. One series started in February 2000 and will finish with the cycle opened at Doha. The European Union, through the then Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, who however never missed an opportunity to say that no state was obliged to liberalise a service activity that they did not want to, felt that the determination of States to liberalise services was much too weak. Bolstered by the very broad mandate at his disposal on the part of European governments, Lamy managed to get the GATS application rules modified. The Doha conference decided that each country must address to each of the others a list of services that they would like to see engaged in a process of liberalisation, a list called “requests”. Similarly, each government must forward the list of services it is willing to itself liberalise, a list called the “offers”.
3. The Agreement on Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS - Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights): this very elaborate form of property rights goes against the application of two fundamental rights: the right to health and the right of a people to sovereignty over their natural resources, rights that are in fact established in international agreements adopted and ratified by all of the States. With respect to the right to health and its operational arm, the right of access to essential medicines, a separate Declaration was adopted following the efforts of developing countries quite rightly united in this struggle as a “question of life or death”. The Declaration adopted at Doha noted the impact of patent rights on the price of medicines. The Doha text on “the TRIPS Agreement and public health” represents a remarkable step forward in policy, but was not translated into any legal acts. The problems posed by the patents in terms of public health and the fight against epidemics were identified and recognised. The States expressed the wish that the application of TRIPS does not go against the right of WTO Members to take appropriate measures to enable access to essential medication. They extended by ten years the starting date for the introduction of TRIPS for the LDCs. But they refused to commit themselves and take any constraining decisions. They forwarded the question of the imports of generic drugs to a negotiation that led to a temporary agreement (see Chapter 5, Other issues) in August 2003.
Concerning peoples’ right to sovereignty over their natural resources and the fight against organi-piracy and patenting living organisms, the Declaration orders the examination of “the issue of the relationship between the TRIPS Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity and the protection of traditional knowledge and customs and other relevant issues...” Even though this formulation does not authorise the renegotiation of TRIPS requested by developing countries, it does not close the discussion as requested by the European Union.
4. The opening of markets to non-agricultural products (better known under the acronym NAMA). The decision to negotiate this question was taken without the explicit agreement of the developing countries. The formulation hides a desire to give manufactured products from rich countries access to the rest of the world’s markets, without any tariff or regulatory limits. Opening up markets on this scale will put companies from rich countries in direct competition with those of developing countries. The result of this competition can be foreseen. The Doha programme excludes any limits to the negotiation: reduce or even eliminate customs duties, “tariff peaks” as well as non-tariff obstacles (legislation and regulations). The text adds: “the range of targeted products will be complete and without a priori exceptions”. As most developing countries have abolished most controlling measures over direct imports (only rich countries have kept this kind of measure), customs duties are practically the only instruments of protection for the industrial sector of these countries. Several studies have shown that a rapid reduction of tariffs on industrial products would have very negative effects on the industrial development of several African nations.
5. Investment, competition, transparency of public markets and trade facilitation. Following the failure of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1999 that was negotiated at the OECD, the European Union made considerable efforts to put the four so-called “Singapore issues” it had negotiated there on the agenda for the cycle of multilateral negotiations. It missed no opportunity to get these issues onto the programme negotiated at Doha. In the two years that followed, these issues caused a genuine confrontation between countries of the Southern hemisphere and the European Union. The intransigence of the Europeans on these questions was one of the causes of the collapse of the Cancun conference.
6. The rules: various WTO agreements give it the task of elaborating “disciplines”. This term covers lists of legal and regulatory provisions adopted by the States that are considered as obstacles to commercial competition. Therefore the elaboration of these “disciplines” constitutes an important step. It enables the WTO to interfere actively in national policies. Amongst the targeted practices are subsidies and rules governing dumping (selling a product abroad for less than it is sold on the home market). What’s more, the ministerial Declaration requests that these negotiations pay particular attention to subsidies in the fishing sector. The Doha programme foresees starting negotiations so as to clarify and improve the “disciplines” in the field of subsidies and antidumping measures. These were often noted as examples of the unfair and imbalanced nature of the WTO agreements by a majority of developing countries. The negotiations about antidumping measures have barely moved forward. The definition of dumping imposed by the rich countries at the WTO is at the root of a genuine swindle: export subsidies are called dumping, but not internal subsidies that enable internal prices to be lowered and then exported at prices below production costs.
7. Regional and bilateral trade agreements: the goal is to avoid these agreements from weakening the multilateral agreements. The rich countries are worried that such agreements limit the impact of WTO agreements by adopting a definition of trade that is closer to that of GATT than the extraordinarily extensive WTO ones. Developing countries, however, request some flexibility at this level. The regional trade agreements passed between developing countries must, according to them, specifically fix a framework that enables them to handle the steps while holding the reins.
8. GATT 1994: agreements made as part of the old GATT until 1994. The negotiations must cover questions about the implementation of existing provisions, particularly in the domain of subsidies (e.g., fisheries) as well as the procedures and disciplines related to regional trade agreements. No agreement has been found.
9. The environment: these negotiations cover the relationship between WTO rules and Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEA), without binding countries that do not sign up to the agreements. The US, therefore, remains free to do as it pleases and to impose on others rules that it refuses to follow itself. Even more serious is the formulation of this provision that indicates an implicit pre-eminence of WTO rules over the regulations that make up international law and an incitation to not adhere to the environmental agreements. The Declaration also announces that the negotiations concerning the environment will bear on the “reduction or elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services”. This paves the way for the privatisation of public environmental services (water, energy, waste...). Prescriptions concerning labelling for environmental purposes, on the other hand, are forwarded to a working group. The priority for sustainable development is not presented as a limit to the extension of free trade.
10. Implementation. These are not actually negotiations about new issues, but the modalities for applying existing agreements. This request was expressed overwhelmingly by the developing countries seeking to ensure that the work on the implementation of the Marrakech agreements and its impact could possibly lead to a revision of the existing agreements, which they did not achieve.
11. Special and differentiated treatment (SDT): all the provisions contained in the various agreements managed by the WTO and which proclaim the necessity of taking into account the specificities of developing countries. These provisions have until now remained at the status of intentions. Their implementation has never been the first concern of the rich countries. This is why the developing countries tied the necessity of making these provisions effective to the implementation of the existing agreements. Before Doha, they presented two documents that bring together a number of concrete proposals, asking that they be debated before any further negotiation on new issues. At Doha, the industrialised countries, to get the agreement of developing countries on the principle of a new cycle of negotiations, consented to discuss these provisions. Despite the good intentions demonstrated by the rich countries, no agreement has been reached. After new attempts, formal discussions were suspended.
12. Reforming the Dispute Settling Body (DSB). This is a legal power granted to the WTO. A State can file a complaint against another for the non-respect of a WTO rule. Only trade competition issues are considered. Measures taken by a country to protect public health or the environment (e.g., banning GMOs or beef treated with growth hormones) or to favour a status (e.g., the monopoly of public bodies over water distribution) are considered as protectionist practices that hinder free trade. The first to judge the case are not magistrates, but experts designated on a case-by-case basis. The sessions are not public. The fundamental principles concerning the independence of the legal procedure (permanence of the magistrates, public hearings) are therefore overruled. By proposing to reform the DSB, the Doha programme announced the only negotiation relating to an existing agreement and the WTO’s functions. Unlike other issues in the new cycle, these negotiations should have been concluded in May 2003. Nothing has been achieved while this WTO “tribunal” is the subject of many criticisms, even from partisans of neo-liberalism.
As can be seen, the Doha programme is characterised by a catalogue of precise proposals that meet the expectations of the rich countries while affirming overall intentions that imply the opening of no negotiations on issues put forward by the developing countries. This explains why the two years following the Doha conference saw no progress in the negotiations and the lack of a decision at the Cancun ministerial conference was the result of this. Baptised “The Doha Development Agenda”, the programme talks of anything but development.
Box
Negotiations in favour of development?
“For all our countries, the most important gains will come from better market access for services and industrial goods (...) the gains for Europe will be colossal.”
Peter Mandelson, European Commissioner, Le Monde, 18 October 2005
2. Agricultural negotiations: the state of play
Since Cancun, this issue has been somewhat unblocked. The negotiation covers three ‘pillars’: export subsidies, domestic support and market access. In other words, customs duties and import quotas.
Export subsidies - progress and deadlocks
– The EU has undertaken to name a credible date for the completion of its phase-out of export subsidies; further commitments are expected on export credits, but there is still deadlock on state trading enterprises and food aid.
– The United States continues to block progress with regard to the commercialisation of food aid.
Domestic support - total deadlock
– Amber Box: The EU, the United States and Japan, each in its own way, are being obstructive on the percentage reduction of its support.
– Blue Box: The EU and the United States are stonewalling on the agreed broadening of the criteria for granting this type of support.
– Green Box: All parties are blocking progress; the idea of tightening the rules so as to prevent support that is inconsistent with the provisions governing this box provokes identical reactions, though for opposite reasons: the EU and the United States reject tighter rules because they wish to maintain the support they currently provide, while the developing countries want to preserve the option of supporting their various sectors of agricultural production.
Market access - partial breakthrough
– The G20 presented a formula designed to lower the level of customs duties and quotas that limit the volume of imports. It was accepted as the basis of future discussions. This formula is a halfway house between the one supported by the EU and the G10 and the one proposed by the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
– The G33 tabled a list of special products and consumer goods that should be exempted from a significant reduction in customs duties. It also proposed a special safeguard mechanism that would allow the G33 countries to raise customs duties to protect themselves against dumping. The G33 was asked to provide criteria for the selection of special products with reference to food security and rural development.
3. Opening of markets to non-agricultural products (NAMA)
The negotiations on access to markets in non-agricultural products revolve around a tariff-reduction formula. An overwhelming majority of the developing countries that had expressed strong opposition in Cancun to any negotiations on this issue have now felt compelled to subscribe to a consensus on the application of a reduction formula. In fact, the industrialised countries and some of the emerging countries have been engaging in discussions on this issue despite the absence of consensus required by the WTO rules.
The formula that the industrialised nations want to impose would apply to all products and would cut the highest customs duties by larger percentages than the lowest tariffs. This formula would penalise the developing countries which have maintained higher tariffs than the industrialised countries and which derive significant resources from those tariffs. Other formulas have been proposed, with different coefficients from one case to another. The entire discussion now centres on these coefficients, and some observers believe this makes an agreement likely within the next few weeks. Nevertheless, the negotiations have been complicated by the tabling of proposals designed to eliminate ‘non-tariff barriers’, in other words to prohibit particular national rules that obstruct access to markets.
The G90 specified that the July 2004 decisions concerning the opening of markets to manufactured goods are contrary to the principle written into the Doha programme that dispense developing countries from full reciprocity in the negotiated degree of market access. These countries pointed out that customs duties have always constituted an important tool for their industrial policy. They contest the studies that announce benefits for them from major liberalisation. They maintain that it is more an act of faith than a precise prediction concerning the impact of globalisation. Opening the markets to non-agricultural products is an anti-development initiative par excellence.
4. Implementing the GATS
It must be borne in mind that the two economic super-powers are those that have formulated the most - and most intense - demands. The US has addressed demands to 141 countries; the European Commission, with the approval of the Union governments, 109.
Unless it is a question of the development of European companies, the official stand of the European Union on a so-called “development agenda” is contradicted by the very initiatives of the Commission which sent lists to 109 countries, adapted to each of them, of services it would like to see privatised in these countries. In other words, the services that these countries will have to open up to the competition of European service suppliers and which could no longer be protected by legislation and national regulations.
As long as these lists were kept secret, the European Commission and some ministers were heard making conciliatory comments such as: “we are sending no demands to the poorest countries”, “we never request the privatisation of public services” and “the national right to regulate services is maintained”. Counting on the complexity of the texts and opacity of the proceedings, Pascal Lamy, the then member of the European Commission, even dared state that, “The WTO negotiations involve trade in services, not the regulation of services as such”. The desire to deceive public opinion about the potentialities of the GATS matches the level of the financial issues at stake in terms of its implementation. These 109 demands are known since February 2003. Of the 109 countries, 94 are classed as developing countries. These include 41 classified as “low-income countries” and 30 are amongst the “least-developed countries (LDCs)".
Box
Some examples of regulations that the European Union would like to suppress
– in Bolivia: the obligation for foreign investors to set up a subsidiary in the country in which they want to carry out business;
– in Botswana: the priority granted to national citizens when it is possible to acquire assets held by foreigners; the public water management monopoly;
– in Brazil: limitation of the transfer overseas of funds produced locally by foreign countries;
– in Cameroon: the obligation, for each investment of at least 10.000 euros, to create one job;
– in Chile: the obligation for foreign investors to employ 85% Chilean personnel and the obligation for foreign investors to keep the invested capital in the country for at least 3 years;
– in Chile and Mexico: the ban on foreigners owning land along the coastline;
– in Cuba and Indonesia: the limit of 49% on foreign ownership of a mixed or joint-venture company;
– in Egypt: the public monopolies on water, energy, transport and construction;
– in Honduras: the public monopoly of water management;
– in Jordan: the obligation for foreign travel agencies to call on local suppliers for the organisation of tourist circuits;
– in Kenya: the limit of 30% on foreign investment in the telecoms sector;
– in India: the obligation for foreign travel agencies to call on the equivalent local company so that in case of infringements, the Indian authorities can identify the person responsible;
– in Malaysia: the limit of 51% of foreign shareholders in insurance companies; criteria for broadcasting advertising in audiovisual programmes;
- in Taiwan: the ban on foreign companies acquiring or renting land containing a source of water or destined for agriculture, forestry, grazing, hunting, salt production or mining;
– in Thailand: the regulation of supermarkets in the distribution sector;
– in Tunisia: the monopoly on the public management of water.
Three subjects emerge from these talks: offers, disciplines and Mode 4.
a) Offers
As of 27 June, 68 countries (if we consider the EU as a single customs territory, in line with the WTO definition of a state) have submitted initial offers. Revised (expanded) offers have been submitted by 25 countries, including 11 developing countries. Pressure from the EU is enormous. It is backed by the US, Canada and Switzerland. Having - very quietly - upped its own requests and offers, for the second time since the talks began, the EU has suggested that the methods employed in these talks be changed.
At the Doha conference, it had proposed a system of requests and offers. But this did not yield the hoped-for results. Only the industrialised countries put forward significant offers. The other WTO members either made no offers for liberalisation or submitted offers that were few in number and did not go very far.
In June 2005 the EU suggested a system of ‘benchmarks’: each country would be required to give a minimum number of qualitative (degree of liberalisation) and quantitative (number of sub sectors) commitments.
Afterwards, the European Commission changed the term benchmarks to common baseline for the talks. It gave a definition which enlarges on the assent given by the EU’s Council of Ministers on 15 June. Henceforth every country will have a twofold commitment to:
– make offers in a minimum number of sectors/sub sectors from an agreed list;
- indicate, for each sector or sub sector committed, a minimum degree of liberalisation in each of the four modes of service provision, this minimum degree being stipulated for each sector.
If the WTO were to adopt this European Commission proposal, sectors or sub sectors on the WTO’s minimum list but not currently on the list of European offers (I am thinking of culture and audiovisual, where it would be naïve to suppose that the US will not include these on the minimum list) or which are on it but with exemptions (to Mode 3, for example, which allows restrictions on foreign ownership of companies), the Commission would be in a position of strength to make the EU Member States extend their offers further to accommodate new WTO decisions which were the Commission’s own brainchild!
What the European Commission is actually trying to achieve is the removal of all the flexibilities allowed for in the GATS (right of countries not to apply the GATS to a given sector or to apply it only partially; special flexibilities for developing countries). It wants to eliminate the concept of the ‘positive list’. Incidentally, this is also one of the things the Bolkestein directive is aiming at for Europe.
Hardly surprising that this comes from the European Union, as this is also one of the objectives of the Bolkestein proposal for Europe.
b) Disciplines
These talks cover practice in regard to government procurement, domestic regulation (conditions relating to quality, procedure, licensing, technical standards), subsidies and national safeguards (a GATT mechanism whereby markets can be closed when import volumes lead to negative effects). Most of the progress in the talks has been on domestic regulation, the industrialised countries being keen to reduce restrictions on their investors. NAFTA has been the model here. As we know, as a result of this free trade agreement, laws to protect populations or the environment adopted after the entry into force of NAFTA are tantamount to ‘expropriation orders’. The USA has also suggested that a country should be able to block the entry into force of a domestic law on the grounds that it constitutes a non-tariff barrier and should be able to refer the case to the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body. A number of developing countries, on the other hand, have called for reaffirmation of every country’s right to regulate and decide the universal service obligations it wishes to impose.
c) Mode 4
The movement of individuals. In its most complete application, an employer in the service sector can temporarily call on personnel from another Member State of the WTO while applying the salary, work rights and social security provisions of the country of origin. Implementing this GATS provision would amount to legalising practices that are currently illegal. Some developing countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan or the Philippines) want this. They hope it will open possibilities for applying Mode 4 to qualified and very qualified professions (professional services). The EU has explicitly presented the “Bolkestein” directive proposal as a positive element in this respect. Mode 4 implies a fundamental question: must workers’ rights and in particular those of migrant workers be regulated by trade agreements or by texts from the International Labour Organisation and the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families? A migrant worker, whether temporary or not, has rights. Crossing a border does not make them disappear. Mode 4 denies these rights as the human being is transformed into a “factor of production” that it considers as a product that can be bought and sold. The way migrant workers are treated in various places gives a clear indication of what will happen to them once Mode 4 is implemented.
5. Other issues
5.1 Intellectual property rights (TRIPS): the two main questions that this agreement poses are still pending: the question of medicine (articles 30 and 31) and that of the patenting of living organisms (article 27,3b):
5.1.1 Access to medicine
The agreement of August 30 2003 has not brought a solution to the dramatic question of access to essential medicine, in other words every person’s fundamental right to access to health care. It in no way changes TRIPS, which standardises, generalises and extends the patent rights - in particular in the domain of medicine. As if medication is a merchandise like any other; as if medicine should first serve the profitability of pharmaceutical firms; as if medicine should not escape from market rules.
What’s more, this agreement betrays the “Doha Declaration on TRIPS and public health” which expresses the wish that TRIPS “does not and should not prevent Members from taking measures to protect public health” and states that “the Agreement can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO Members’ right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all”.
The Declaration announced negotiations concerning the immense majority of countries massively hit by numerous mortal diseases and that do not have their own pharmaceutical industries and must be able to use so-called “parallel imports” (medication from countries in which it is the cheapest, without the approval of the patent holder). This negotiation saw the European Union come back on the scope of the terms adopted at Doha; the US and Switzerland, that had barely accepted the Doha Declaration while stressing its lack of legal force, continued to contest the principles it contains. The western block did its best to restrict the notion of countries with or without production capacity, serious health crises and, for a long time, the discussion centred on a limited list of diseases worthy of treatment.
The Doha Declaration stipulated that “each Member has the right to grant compulsory licences (the production of generic medication without the consent of the patent holder) and the freedom to determine the grounds upon which such licences are granted”. It added: “each Member has the right to determine what constitutes a national emergency or other circumstance of extreme urgency”. In the agreement arrived at two years later, these rights were replaced by an obligation to justify the use of an obligatory licence or parallel imports and by the obligation to prove the existence of a crisis situation. Upon its signature, the agreement was denounced as impracticable. It in effect imposed such conditions that it could never be implemented. In 2005 as in 2003, tens of thousands of people died without access to the medication they need.
After reading this medley of conditions, it is worth remembering what is at stake: enabling the ill to have the medicine they need. It is clear that between the right to care and the right to profit, it is not the first that was given the absolute priority. The agreement of August 30 2003 foresaw a negotiation for revising articles of TRIPS. No progress has been made on this.
Box
Conditions imposed by the rich countries on those of the Southern hemisphere with a production capacity (South Africa, Brazil, India, Thailand...) so they can export generic medication to other southern countries that need it:
a) the country importing generic medication must provide proof that it is facing a health crisis;
b) every Member state of the WTO can contest the pertinence of the arguments put forward by the requesting country;
c) the requesting country must provide proof that it does not itself have production capacity;
d) the requesting country must submit to the WTO the name and quantity of the medication it wishes to import;
e) the requesting country must put in place a very sophisticated administrative and customs system so as to avoid any re-exports to western markets of imported generic medicine; this requirement is quite simply inapplicable, given the lack of human resources, the institutional and administrative weaknesses and the lack of financial means in some countries;
f) countries supplying the medicine cannot use this agreement as “an instrument of trade or industrial policy”; this prohibition could be used in a possible conflict caused by the pharmaceutical multinationals in cases where a country requiring a compulsory licence is motivated by the need to face a monopoly situation; how can health needs be separated from a strategy for supplying medicine that is inevitably industrial and commercial?
g) the producing country must limit the compulsory licence to the sort of medicine and the quantities requested; this information (types of medicine and quantities) must be brought to the attention of all the WTO Member States by the producing country;
h) the use of parallel imports is limited to “exceptional circumstances” ; this expression is assimilated with the notion of occasional urgent aid, which is not the same as more long-term development aid; this hampers the freedom of countries without pharmaceutical production to import low-cost medicine if they are not confronted with a health catastrophe. This limit is completely contradictory to the Declaration adopted at Doha, which spoke of “public health”.
5.1.2 Patenting living organisms and organi-piracy
Article 27.3b: the Southern countries have repeatedly requested a revision that the industrialised countries categorically refuse. The very text of the article, however, provided that “the provisions of this subparagraph shall be reviewed four years after the date of entry into force of the WTO Agreement”. What’s more, article 71 of the Agreement requires its revision every two years. These concessions were made to developing countries for their support of the TRIPS agreement during the Uruguay Round of negotiations. Four years later, in Seattle, the rich countries refused both the re-examination of article 27.3b and the application of article 71 if it involved going beyond the simple verification of the Agreement’s implementation. Nothing has changed since Seattle.
5.2. The cotton issue
Cotton constitutes a vital resource for most countries in sub-Saharan Africa: Benin, (75 % of export income), Burkina Faso (60 % of exports and more than one-third of GDP), Mali (half of its currency resources), Chad (first export product). What’s more, the oil obtained from seeds provides most of the oil consumed in food in Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad, Togo and a large proportion in Ivory Coast and Cameroon. And that’s not mentioning the cattle feed derived from cotton.
But African cotton exports are in competition with those of the US and Europe. The US subsidises cotton exports to the tune of 4 billion dollars per year. The European Union spends some 700 million euros a year. No African country has the means to support cotton exports, which are then more expensive on the market than cotton from the US and Europe.
At the Cancun ministerial conference, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad, supported by other African countries, raised the issue and requested that the WTO rules prohibiting this kind of export subsidies be respected. A refusal was notified on the part of the US, who invited them to diversify their agricultural production. Since then, no progress has come from the many meetings on this subject. As part of the July 2004 agreement, cotton was included in the trade negotiations: “The General Council recognizes the importance of cotton for a certain number of countries and its vital importance for developing countries, especially LDCs. It will be addressed ambitiously, expeditiously, and specifically, within the agriculture negotiations”. But no solution has been forthcoming so far, although it is a question of enforcing respect of WTO rules by the richest countries. This is what is blocking any solution!
6. Outlook for the Hong Kong ministerial conference
Negotiations at the WTO ahead of ministerial conferences are characterised by a series of practices that it is worth knowing about so as to understand how an agreement can sometimes be obtained despite the opposition of several States and the rule of consensus.
6.1. WTO ministerial conferences
Ministerial conferences are the supreme organ of the WTO. Constituted by foreign trade ministers from 148 Member States, they are competent for all issues on which they agree. They meet at least every two years. Until now, they have been held in different locations every time. Following Singapore in 1996, it was Geneva in 1998, Seattle in 1999, Doha in 2001 and Cancun in 2003. In December 2005, it will be Hong Kong’s turn. All decisions require the implicit consensus of the States.
Both the preparation and the proceedings of the conference itself are the subject of manipulations, and democracy is far from being respected. This is why many Southern countries are calling for new rules to guarantee that the preparation and proceedings be transparent, non-discriminatory and foreseeable.
Since Doha, the preparation of a ministerial conference is marked by the same trait: imposing the viewpoint of industrialised nations and sidelining the expectations of Southern countries. The preparatory documents are put together by the Director-General or the President of the General Council (the permanent representation of ambassadors to the WTO), or by both when they agree. These documents are noted by an overall tendency to favour the expectations of the industrialised countries. Most requests formulated by developing countries are not covered in these documents, not even between brackets, as was the case until Seattle.
The draft ministerial declaration, the result of numerous negotiation groups, ultimately leads to informal meetings, either at an ambassadorial or a ministerial level, from which many developing countries are excluded despite their specific requests to take part. The Director General or the president of the Council under their own authority and personal responsibility, then send this draft - which does not have the consensus of the General Council - to the Ministerial Conference. So the conference can then take place on the basis of a text that, for the most part, suits the richer countries.
Informal meetings from which some ministers are excluded are held during the ministerial conference, upon instructions of the European Union and the US. They are sometimes allowed access only on the condition that they do not come accompanied by experts - even their ambassador in Geneva - whereas the Europeans and Americans bring their teams of lawyers. Occasionally, some are admitted on condition they do not speak. It can happen that the Southern ministers are requested to successively visit representatives of the European Union or the US. Promises and threats follow one upon another.
Learning the lessons from these practices, 15 countries put forward a series of proposals so that the preparation and proceedings of future ministerial conferences would not be undermined by such abuses of power. They request that the decisions adopted during the informal meetings be without value and in no way considered part of the formal preparation process. They ask for a series of technical reforms that would enable all the Members to contribute at every level of the conference preparations and that it be impossible to ban a State representative from taking part in a WTO meeting. And above all, they ask that the draft declaration and agenda to be put to the conference be the subject of a consensus of the General Council. If consensus is not reached, the various options should be submitted to the conference. Lastly, they ask that the ministerial conference be held systematically at the WTO headquarters in Geneva, which would greatly facilitate the participation of developing countries. Their proposals are being fought by the European Union and the US, who in other circumstances give lessons in democracy and the respect of the rule of law.
6.2. Hong Kong: a new Cancun or a step forward for the Doha programme?
The General Council was scheduled to meet on October 19 and 20. It was hailed as being vital for the preparation of the Hong Kong conference. It finished on the 19th at midday without any decisions being announced. The state of play of the negotiations at six weeks from the Hong Kong conference, unless significant breakthroughs are made on several issues, allow us to think that the prospect of a new Cancun is entirely possible.
Agriculture
The United States is demanding European concessions on agriculture as a condition for any discussion on the other issues. The Europeans, on the other hand, want to trade agriculture for the opening of markets for manufactured goods and services. The European position is in total contradiction with the principle enshrined in the Marrakech Agreement and which was re-stated in the Doha Declaration: the right of the poorest countries to not offer full reciprocity for benefits they obtain.
The American and European proposals are but hollow promises given what is being asked to bring an end to the unfair competition that the two economic superpowers offer peasant farmers the world over. The European proposals do not meet the legitimate demands of European farmers either.
Talking about the American and European proposals after the WTO’s last General Council meeting on October 19, a delegate from the ACP group declared: “I am disappointed by what is being presented as concessions,” and one of his colleagues referring to the date of 2010 suggested by the US to end their export subsidies, added: “Why should we be satisfied about having to tolerate another five years of export subsidies?”
Nama
The goal expressed by the negotiation group’s president is to get precise figures concerning the conditions of customs duty reductions by country. We can presume that he will either try to get an agreement, or go without it and prepare a text for the draft ministerial declaration that will mention these figures.
Services
Proposals similar to those of the European Union were tabled by Australia, Canada, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland and Taiwan. The European Union, not accepting its defeat at Cancun in the field of investments in public markets, is including them in the fields that should be the subject of minimal lists. There is now strong pressure on developing countries to accept the integration of quantified and qualitative objectives in the tendering process. In an attempt to separate the LDCs from other developing countries, proposals are being made to temporarily exempt them.
The negotiation group’s president on services has indicated that 23 developing countries have still made no offers. He regrets that the quality of the offers is mediocre in most cases. This implies his support for the proposal of quantitative and qualitative minimal lists to be imposed on each country. Despite the opposition of a large number of developing countries to these minimal lists, the president has declared that he received no real opposition and the chapter on services in the draft ministerial declaration that he has prepared does not take it into account. He even added that once an agreement on these lists is arrived at in Hong Kong, the spring of 2006 would be “the hunting season for services”.
Cotton
No new elements have been brought to the issue of cotton. The recent American and European proposals for agriculture ignore the problem. There is considerable fear that these countries will come back from Hong Kong with nothing. They will not accept this. They have just declared so.
Medicine
The president of the general council regrets the absence of progress on this issue, but she considers that the 2003 agreement is a derogation that is still valid... No mention is made of the total inefficiency of this derogation.
Bananas
A decision at Doha confirmed the temporary nature of the autonomous tariff regulations applied by the European Union to bananas imported from ACP countries. An agreement between the European Union and ACP banana producers guarantees quotas at specific tariff rates. This is contrary to the WTO agreements.
The US and a certain number of Asian and Latin American countries that produce bananas raised this issue. Finally, the Doha conference accepted a derogation for 750,000 tonnes of bananas. This derogation comes to an end on December 31, 2005.
Questions tied to development
The main concern of the G90 countries is to ensure that the idea of “development” remains at the heart of the negotiations. As an ambassador from one of these countries said at Geneva, on the sideline of the General Council, “this negotiation cycle looks much more like a cycle for access to markets than a cycle for development”.
Nonetheless, the G90 hope to make headway on three issues:
a) that the flexibility written into the Marrakech agreements in favour of the LDCs be protected;
b) that these countries get the capacity to trade;
c) that the products they export are granted access to markets in rich countries.
They note, however, the pro-development language of the Doha programme has now been replaced by the firm will of the rich countries to open up the world’s markets to their businesses. So who, therefore, stands to gain from market access? As one African ambassador put it: “what use is market access if we have nothing to sell?”
7. The position of the GUE/NGL group on the WTO negotiations
For the GUE/NGL parliamentary group, one thing is clear: Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson is zealously following the work of his predecessors Leon Brittan and Pascal Lamy. This is explained by his personal convictions (“we are all Thatcherites,” he wrote in the The Times of June 10, 2002), but also by support of the 25 governments for an obsessive strategy of conquering markets and liberalisation at any cost. This strategy can be seen in the WTO but also in the free trade agreements that the EU is trying to sign with the ACP countries (Economic Partnership Agreements) or other regions (Latin America, the Mediterranean...).
It is notably manifest in an attempt to create a massive liberalisation of services - also present in the “Bolkestein” directive - and the imposition of a systematic lowering of customs duties on non-agricultural products (NAMA), which goes beyond even the Doha agenda.
The GUE/NGL Group rejects this course of action which is directly linked to the strategy of lowering salary costs and social standards, increasing company relocations, the liberalisation of public services, to the detriment of the environment and of culture in the European Union and developing countries.
Changing the mandate of the European Commission
Consequently, any action on WTO negotiations requires a revision of the mandate conferred on the Trade Commissioner by the governments, which the GUE/NGL Group has been requesting for several years. This mandate was adopted in 1999, before Seattle, largely confirmed in December 2003 following Cancun, and fine-tuned on June 15 last. The mandate meets the expectations of transnational companies. It is a mandate that can be summed up in a simple formula: deregulate as much as necessary to allow the most open access to markets.
After the failures of Seattle and Cancun and the massive anti-globalisation and trade union movements in Europe and throughout the world as well as the justified objections to the European proposals repeated for years by the Southern countries; at a time when the social and environmental damage, pandemics and the problems of development, are taking dramatic proportions on a global scale, the European Union must re-evaluate its negotiation position and realise that the mandate given to the negotiator is no longer well-founded.
Putting forward other priorities: social, development, the environment, cultural diversity, world governance
The EU mandate being proposed by the GUE/NGL Group must answer the real questions worrying European citizens, instead of trying to satisfy the obsession of major European groups to access the markets of developing countries. These concerns include employment, company relocations, de-industrialisation, the fall in social standards, food safety problems, treating culture as a marketable good as well as the major challenges to civilisation such as the question of development - and in particular hunger - AIDS, and other pandemics.
The European Union must stop nurturing the myth that development involves opening markets at any cost. It must accept that the countries decide for themselves on what basis they want to develop, at what pace they want to open their borders according to the degree of development of the various economic sectors, and with which partners they want to cooperate. This implies a halt to the pressure being put on them both as part of the WTO negotiations, and through the many conditions imposed in parallel by international financial institutions. It is worth remembering that the EU and the US hold absolute majorities in these bodies and that they are continuing to block any development, notably through the debt mechanism that the GUE/NGL Group wants to see abolished as it is immoral and illegal.
Making world governance more democratic
In the short term, the GUE/NGL supports developing countries, and notably the G33, that are calling for the democratisation of the WTO’s internal procedures. A precise calendar must be drawn up for the issues to be negotiated before the end of the Doha round (December 2006). This includes a methodology that would be global, transparent and include all the Member States, and that certain antidemocratic practices be banned, such as:
– negotiation in closed circles (Green Room, etc...) of texts that are then presented on a take-it-or-leave-it basis;
– the habit of accusing those who refuse proposals from industrialised countries of trying to destroy the Doha programme or even of not wanting to contribute to the fight against terrorism;
The WTO must be fully integrated into the United Nations system and coherence between the WTO objectives and those of other organisations in this system guaranteed. A hierarchy of international legal standards must be introduced, giving priority to the three predominant international instruments (human rights; civil and political rights; economic, social and cultural rights) as well as environmental standards and other conventions, notably the Convention on the Elimination of any Form of Discrimination against Women. The legal power, that the WTO is the only international body to wield, must be withdrawn. The International Court of Justice could create a chamber competent for issues relating to institutions with normative powers (ILO, WHO, WTO, IPO, UNESCO), composed of qualified magistrates who respect the concept of an independent Justice.
Halting liberalisation
On the issue of negotiations on non-agricultural products (NAMA), the GUE/NGL Group asks that the pressure being brought to bear for a massive reduction in protection be ended, and that the protection of developing industries be recognised as an element of the right to development. Greater access to our markets should be reserved for finished products from developing countries so as to support their processing industries and reinforce their national and regional markets, by no longer limiting them to the role of raw material providers.
The recent question of massive Chinese textile imports also shows how a certain level of protection is necessary to enable the survival of industrial activity, in particular with the total absence of mechanisms that render obligatory, at the very least, the application of the ILO (International Labour Organisation) Conventions, but also moving forward in the elaboration and application of adequate national social and environmental standards. The GUE/NGL Group refuses liberalisation that condemns whole sections of economic activity to extinction and the loss of millions of jobs in Europe or elsewhere, as is the case in textiles, but also in many other sectors (shoes, car manufacturing, steelworks,...) It also feels that the simple liberalisation of markets between very unequal partners, or in the total absence of harmonisation of social, fiscal and environmental rules, brings about unacceptable social regression.
In many cases, it is in fact European investors who benefit from liberalisation by inundating the European market and by relocating their activities so as to avoid their social and environmental obligations. We know, for example, that European investors are present in 60% of the Chinese companies exporting to Europe. The GUE/NGL Group has repeatedly asked that these companies that relocate no longer have access to European Union subsidies.
Controlling the activities of multinationals
Instead of proposing simple codes of conduct so that multinational companies respect international social, environmental and human rights standards, the European Union, as a world trade power, must act to make these standards obligatory and accompany them with sanctions (like the WTO trade standards).
The intensification of the EU’s trade must be primarily with countries or regional groups that equip themselves with progressive social and environmental legislation rather than with those that deregulate their markets, as is currently the case. Initiatives such as the negotiation of the Americas Social Charter, part of the OAS (Organisation of American States), on the initiative of Venezuela, should be encouraged. Other initiatives such as the fair-trade networks should also be supported further by the European Union and favoured in international negotiations at the WTO.
Reinforcing public services
Concerning services, our group is opposed to their liberalisation, a priority only for multinational companies. Most developing countries, like European citizens, are against it. The countries should, at the very least, be given a free choice in the matter. For the GUE/NGL Group, it is in fact the reinforcing of public services that is essential for the development of social justice. This is why it is opposed to GATS. The minimum would be a renegotiation of GATS so as to include the definition of public services and exclude them from any trade agreements. In any case, the EU should demand the explicit exclusion of health, education, culture (including the audio-visual sector) and the environment (including water management) from the list of services to which GATS applies.
Guaranteeing food safety for all
On the issue of agriculture, the GUE/NGL Group calls for the right to sovereignty over food and food safety as absolute priorities. In the short term, it demands that the European Union and the other industrialised countries eliminate export subsidies on agricultural products immediately without any reciprocity. It is fighting for the CAP to be made more democratic and that instead of supporting agro-business and giant farm holdings, it should serve to support a genuinely sustainable agriculture and only benefit real farmers and the defence of the social, environmental and territorial functions of agriculture. It demands the right for each country to guarantee its sovereignty and food safety, and feels that a body like the WTO that works to a commercial logic cannot regulate agriculture.
Stabilising the price of agricultural products and raw materials
The GUE/NGL Group believes that instead of systematically dismantling all the mechanisms that are trying to stabilise the price of raw materials (Stabex, Sysmin, the sugar CMO, banana markets,...) as is currently happening under the pretext of conforming to the WTO, the European Union should on the contrary reinforce them to meet the objectives of development proclaimed in the introduction to the Marrakech agreements, and/or create others. New initiatives must be taken that guarantee a fair and stable price for raw materials and guarantee access to the markets of industrialised countries. Fair prices for products such as cotton and sugar necessarily imply control over the product offer. The falling price of raw materials for producers and the increase in profits for shopkeepers and major distributors make the intervention of public authorities indispensable and urgent so as to fix this imbalance.
The EU must insist that the WTO respect and encourage the regional agreements that favour exchanges between countries of similar economies, and enable a harmonious strengthening of national and regional markets. The WTO should also be used to build inter-regional agreements that strive to improve and stabilise the price of raw materials.
Enabling access to medication, stemming epidemics
The GUE/NGL Group believes that the European Union must propose a reform of the agreements on intellectual property (TRIPS) so as to avoid organi-piracy, the patenting of living organisms and to avoid that they continue to hinder the fight against epidemics such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, avian flu, etc. The survival of millions of people is far more important than the scandalous profits of a few large pharmaceutical laboratories. The exceptions granted at Doha, which should be temporary pending a reform of the Agreements, did not bring about the anticipated solutions. The TRIPS agreements, in their current form, do not enable us to combat epidemics. They are also an obstacle to the transfer of technology towards developing countries, and inhibit the small farmers’ free access to traditional seeds, while reinforcing the position of producers of GMOs and sterile seeds.
Applying the principle of precaution
Concerning the propagation of GMOs, but also other questions such as importing hormone-treated meat or issues concerning the environment, the GUE/NGL Group requests that the principle of precaution be broadly applied. This enables a country to refuse the propagation of products potentially harmful to public health or the environment in that territory.
Excluding water and other public commodities from the market field
The GUE/NGL Group defends the exclusion of several sectors essential for the survival of humanity from the domain of the WTO. This is the case for water, which must urgently be declared a public commodity worldwide and excluded from the market field. But also access to land, health, education, culture and access to energy.
Conclusion
International trade negotiations currently have a direct influence on the daily life and sometimes the survival of each of us. Putting a stop to these neo-liberal policies is everyone’s business. The WTO Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong is a new attempt to accelerate liberalisation. Various important victories such as the rejection of the European Constitution, which would have resulted in the ratification and acceleration of the EU’s neo-liberal drift, UNESCO’s recent adoption of the Convention for the promotion and protection of cultural diversity, Uruguay’s referendum against the privatisation of water, the WTO’s failure at Seattle and Cancun all constitute important steps in slowing down these policies and offering alternatives. The GUE/NGL is fully committed to this, together with progressive forces from various continents and alongside the social movements.
Box
“The least-developed countries, (...) will only be required to undertake commitments and concessions to the extent consistent with their individual development, financial and trade needs, or their administrative and institutional capabilities.”
The Marrakech Agreements, 1994.
Some useful sites for further information
WTO: http://www.wto.org
TWN: www.twnside.org.sg
VIA CAMPESINA: http://www.viacampesina.org
ATTAC: http://www.attac.org
ESSF: http://europe-solidaire.org
FOE: http://www.foeeurope.org
FOGS: http://www.focusweb.org
IATP: http://www.iatp.org
IFG: http://www.ifg.org
OWINFS: http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org
PSI: http://www.world-psi.org
S2B: http://www.s2bnetwork.org
South Centre: http://www.southcentre.org
URFIG: http://www.urfig.org
European Left Party: http://www.european-left.org
The GUE/NGL Group: http://www.guengl.org
Brochure produced by Raoul Marc Jennar and Paul-Emile Dupret