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Sharad Joshi

With Cancun just days off, various groups of nations are sitting in conclaves to work out ways and means to ensure that the bicycle of trade negotiations does not fall, and the WTO ministerial does not end in abject failure. This would be a serious setback to multi-lateral trade, says Sharad Joshi, quickly tracing the WTO story so far.

NOBODY had heard of Cancun till the Doha declaration put it on the world map. Marrakesh, Doha, Cancun — the World Trade Organisation (WTO) seems to be unwittingly doing its bit to improve people's knowledge of geography.

The provisions regarding the geographical appellations under the Intellectual Property Rights Agreement included Scotch whisky and Champagne bubbly wine but not Darjeeling tea or Ratnagiri Alphonso.

The sites of WTO ministerial meetings became particularly celebrated because each of them witnessed boisterous demonstrations by anti-liberalisation and anti-globalisation mobs.

The third ministerial at Seattle was scuttled because the ministers, in the circumstances prevailing there, could not agree on an agenda for negotiations.

The riots at Genoa resulted in one death.

The Doha ministerial was not affected by the activities on the street; the possible reason being that the concepts of civil liberty are quite different in West Asia than elsewhere.

And now, another five-day ministerial conference is scheduled to begin in Cancun (Mexico) on September 10.

Trade negotiations are like a cycle ride. They have to be running to maintain balance and keep going.

The full agenda of freeing multilateral international trade will, possibly, never be completed. The negotiators advance a few paces and then realise that the agenda needs to be broadened if the whole process is to make any sense and bring the desired benefits.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) started at about the same time as the Bretton Woods Conference and the Los Angeles endeavour to create a United Nations.

It was on October 30, 1947 that 23 countries concluded the protocol for the provisional application of GATT. That was in Geneva (Switzerland).

The agreement entered into force on January 1, 1948. After that followed a succession of negotiation rounds — in Annecy (France) 1949; Torquay (England) 1950-51; Geneva (Switzerland) 1956; Dillon (Switzerland) 1960-62; Kennedy Round 1963-67; Geneva 1973-79, called the Tokyo round; and, finally, Uruguay 1986-94. Each round of negotiations took longer than the previous one to finalise the Act.

The celebrated Uruguay Round started in 1986 and its agreements were signed at Marrakesh (Morocco) nine years later.

Basically, there is only one agreement to form a World Trade Organisation (WTO) but annexed thereto are 28 agreements — not counting understandings, protocols, decisions and declarations — forming a veritable forest of rules and regulations that would be the delight of any lawyer or an econometrician aspiring to make a career through undecipherable abracadabra.

That was not the end of the matter. When hundreds of jurists and experts, each nursing a separate vested interest lobby, come together, the discussions go on and on. Contentious matters cannot always be settled by clear agreements. Diplomats have evolved, over years, drafting gimmicks that give some satisfaction to all the parties concerned.

The WTO began operating in January 1995. Within the first three years, its members put their hands to agreements — not on the table at Marrakesh — on telecommunications, financial services and information technology.

The negotiations on the movement of natural persons were concluded in 1995 with modest agreement. Negotiations on maritime transportation failed. Those on telecommunication and financial services are at various stages of progress.

Negotiations to improve the WTO agreement on government procurement began in 1998 but failed quickly for obvious reasons.

Negotiations on agriculture and services — the toughest nut on the platter — were supposed to have started by 2000. However, the participants could not agree on the negotiating agenda in time. The first post-Marrakesh ministerial conference in Singapore (December 1996) made things more complicated by initiating studies on trade and investment, trade and competition as also transparency in government procurement and trade facilitation.

The second ministerial conference in Geneva (May 1998) took on the additional work of agreement on electronic commerce.

The third ministerial, in Seattle, closed without making any progress.

In the last ministerial in Doha (2001), there was no real progress in fixing the agenda or programme of action. The richer countries had a manifest interest in dodging concrete action on implementing the Marrakesh commitments and tried to broaden the agenda by bringing — if not to the table, at least on the radar screen — subjects like labour laws, environment, the four Singapore issues, matters relating to Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and public health.

The last has gained urgency because of the spread of AIDS in Africa and SARS in Asia.

As regards the implementation of Marrakesh commitments relating to freer access and lower domestic and export subsidies, the richer countries have made no substantive progress in implementation.

The European Union has made a sort of a symbolic gesture by delinking subsidies from income levels. Neither the developing countries nor the Cairns nations are enthused at that. Japan and the US realised the importance of their commitments at Marrakesh but have difficulty making pronouncements because of the impending elections in the US.

The richer countries are sitting in a conclave in Geneva to work out ways and means to ensure that the bicycle of trade negotiations does not collapse and that the negotiations proceed without ending in abject failure, which would be a serious setback to multi-lateral trade .

The Indian negotiators were ill prepared for the Uruguay Round. They indulged in some histrionics in Doha and convinced everybody at home about their triumph.

In the present situation too, New Delhi has no clear positions on the negotiations but, with the approaching general elections, would like to give voters the impression that India did not yield in Doha and Cancun more territory than the Congress did in the Uruguay round.

So, what are the prospects at Cancun? The basic proposition is simple. Multilateral trade unhindered by governmental interventions in the long run is good for all the parties concerned. Unfortunately, politicians are too short-sighted to bother about the long run.

If the trade negotiations were taking place between national chambers of commerce, industry and agriculture, most issues would have been resolved quicker. Once the governments became negotiating parties, inevitably came in the legalese, the `whereas', `wheretofore', `notwithstanding' and the rest of the jargon and conveniently manipulated statistics and econometrics of pedantic.

The WTO has been so dominated by the jurists, the economists and the bureaucrats that they could, if they wished, continue the negotiating rounds till the cows — with or without foot and mouth disease — come home.

Outside, on the roads of Cancun, the scene may be quite different. Various anti-globalisation fora have made assiduous preparations to improve on their performance at Seattle. In the documents they exchange on the Internet, they have clearly called for derailing the WTO through people's mobilisation around Cancun, linking the WTO agenda to popular campaigners, elevating local struggles and impacting WTO decisions.

The wreckers are armed with detailed maps of Cancun, contact information with local groups, schedules of official conferences and receptions. They plan to observe a women's day, a bio-diversity day and an anti-WTO day. The whole thing will reach a crescendo on the September 15, which happens to Mexico's Independence Day.

Inside the conference hall at Cancun, it may be like the American civil war. Unfortunately, there will be no Abraham Lincoln to bring light to the debates. There will be hundreds of John Wilkes Booths toting their guns. The only ray of hope is that the Booths can never really make the Lincolns disappear from the face of the earth.

(The author is Founder, Shetkari Sanghatana. Feedback may be sent to sharad@mah.nic.in)

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