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WTO-CANCUN: Call to End 'Arm-Twisting'
By Sanjay Suri
LONDON, Sep 9 (IPS) - A group of leading development organisations have
asked for an end to "arm-twisting" tactics at the meeting of trade
ministers in Cancun.
The Britain-based non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have asked
the British Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt to ensure transparency and
fairness at the talks this week.
In doing so, they have joined 11 African nations that had come up
with a similar demand three weeks ago. However, their proposals have not
been backed by the European Union or the United States.
The demand was given a new immediacy after it won backing by former
WTO ambassador for the Dominican Republic, Federico Cuello. He said he
was speaking from first-hand experience of such tactics.
The developing countries in the WTO "are not free to speak nor to
associate," Cuello said at a meeting organised by the NGOs to present
their demands.
"Countries are penalised for speaking their minds or for building
alliances with like-minded countries. Countries are not free to promote
their national interests. Their issues are ignored unless presented as
group proposals."
If these groups become effective, "their ambassadors are removed from
their posts," he said. "I should know this, as I, together with five
other of my colleagues, was one of the victims of a collective
decapitation of ambassadors that started at Doha."
The NGO group, which includes ActionAid, Christian Aid, Friends of
the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds, Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund, World
Development Movement and WWF-UK, has presented a set of practical
suggestions to ensure greater transparency in negotiations at Cancun.
These suggestions include the following:
- All negotiating meetings should be announced at least six hours in
advance to the entire membership through a daily calendar.
- No country is excluded from meetings.
- The chairs of negotiations should be neutral and elected by all the
member countries, not handpicked by rich nations. In the present chair
driven system, increased reliance is placed on chairpersons, which gives
unprecedented power to handpicked individuals.
- Ministerial meetings cannot be extended without warning or agreement.
There must be a cut-off time because small delegations have no capacity
to stagger their human resources.
- Negotiators should be allowed time to eat and sleep. At Doha some
meetings continued 38 hours at a stretch.
- Negotiating documents should accurately reflect the views of all WTO
members, and not just the EU and the U.S. The WTO Secretariat must be
neutral when members are in disagreement.
"We have witnessed first hand at Doha how the WTO process is
manipulated by strong countries," Tom Crompton from WWF-UK told IPS. "We
have had too many of these mini-ministerial meetings of hand-picked
ministers," he said.
"This has been done in a way that excluded the vast majority of WTO
members."
EU officials have said that the demands made by the group of NGOs
cannot be met. "The rejoinder is that it is difficult to manage the
decision-making process for 146 countries," he said. "But our proposals
are very specific, procedural things."
At Doha, he said, ministerial meetings were extended, and many
ministers from smaller countries had to leave because they could not
prolong their stay. "This may sound a trivial procedural matter, but
meetings must finish when scheduled," he said.
"Developing countries are hopelessly out-gunned from the start," says
Peter Hardstaff from the World Development Movement.
"At negotiations in Doha, the EU had over 500 delegates, Mauritius
two and Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere had none.
The whole system should be geared to helping these countries have a
voice, yet it consistently acts to silence them. The bullying behaviour
and lack of real rules at the WTO would disgrace a village bowls club."
The NGO arguments have been bolstered by the publication of a book
'Behind the Scenes' by WTO watchers Fatoumata Jawara and Aileen Kwa.
"Arm-twisting through a combination of threats and inducements to
countries and ambassadors was a key feature of the process leading to
the 'agreement' in Doha," the authors say.
"Only the rich have real leverage, while most developing countries
are so desperate for trade opportunities, aid, debt reduction etc. that
they have little choice but to succumb."
The report claims that the U.S. maintains a list of 'unhelpful'
developing country trade negotiators. It says that the supposedly
neutral WTO secretariat has often misinformed developing countries about
the position of others.
The report says that at Doha Tanzania like some others "caved in
under pressure and succumbed to the offer of a few crumbs." But only a
week later the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
suddenly announced that Tanzania would receive external debt relief of
three billion dollars over time."
Attempts by developing countries to rectify the situation that makes
this kind of thing possible have been met "either by cursory dismissal
or a wall of silence," the NGOs say in their statement. A move to
correct this situation made last year by 15 countries in Geneva could
have been a crucial step in the right direction, but no such step was
taken, they say. (END/2003)
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