Great divide sinks world trade reform

September 15, 2003 - 10:05AM
AP/AAP

Talks designed to change the face of trade around the world have collapsed for the second time in four years amid differences between rich and poor nations.

The collapse was a disappointment and a lost opportunity, a spokesman for Australian Trade Minister Mark Vaile said today.

Speaking from Cancun, Mexico, shortly after the talks failed, the spokesman said the meeting had broken up over issues first raised at a WTO meeting in Singapore in 1996.

"This happened just as we believed there was the prospect of progress on agriculture," he said."It is very disappointing that this conference has ended in this manner. We feel it was a lost opportunity but we look ahead." However, delegates from many poor countries celebrated this second WTO failure in four years as a victory against the West.

An increasingly powerful alliance of poor but populous farming nations said they had found a new voice to rival the developed world. "The developing countries have come into their own," Malaysian international trade and investment minister Rafidah Aziz said.

"This has made it clear that developing countries cannot be dictated to by anybody." Hours later, the meeting's chairman, Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez, declared the meeting over, saying: "Unfortunately, we didn't achieve the advances we had proposed to achieve" and pledging to work toward completing negotiations in the future. In the end, it was the diverging agendas of 146 member countries that split delegates beyond the point of repair.

Poor nations, many of which had banded together to play a key role in negotiations, wanted to end rich countries' agricultural subsidies. European nations and Japan were intent on pushing four new issues that many poor countries saw as a complicated and costly distraction.

Many poor countries accused the United States and Europe of trying to bully poor nations into accepting trade rules they didn't want. "Trade ministers have been pressured, blackmailed," said Irene Ovonji Odida, a delegate from Uganda.

The United States blamed some countries, which it did not name, that it said were more interested in flowery speeches than negotiations.

"Some countries will now need to decide whether they want to make a point, or whether they want to make progress," US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said.

His comments appeared directed at a group of mostly poor nations -often known as the Group of 20-plus - that emerged as the major opposition to the US and European positions. The group represents most of the world's population and includes China, India, Indonesia and Brazil. Leaders of that group said they had brought concrete issues to the table that would be the basis for future trade talks.

"We emerge from this process stronger than we came into it,"Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said. Ecuador's foreign trade minister, Ivonne Baki, added: "It's not the end. It's the beginning." The failure in Cancun was a major blow to the WTO, and called into question the organisation's ability to reach a global trade treaty by the end of next year - a goal WTO members set for themselves at a meeting two years ago in Doha, Qatar.
"It's hard for me to believe that in the position we're in now we'll be able to finish on time," Zoellick said. But Amorim said real progress had been made, and that the WTO would continue to negotiate the same points in the future on the basis of advances made in Cancun.

"It's a setback not to have a result now. But we are optimistic in the long run," he said. In the agriculture talks, poor nations had hoped to slash subsidies that rich countries pay their farmers, making it easier for their farmers to compete in a global economy. Some countries also wanted to lower the tariffs many countries charge for importing farm goods.

Doing so could have dramatically altered farming around the world. Some farmers could have found new markets for their crops. Others would have struggled to compete without the subsidies that keep them in business. Consumers might have benefited from cheaper fruit, vegetables and meat from distant shores.

Advocacy groups, which spent much of the meeting working with developing nations to make sure their voices were heard, sang and danced in the hallways of the conference centre as the talks collapsed. Many hugged one another.
"Our world is not for sale, my friend, just to keep you satisfied," they sang to the tune of the Beatles' Can't Buy Me Love. "You say you'll bring us health and wealth, well we know that you just lied."