TRADE: India Backs Lamy as WTO Head, But Activists Furious

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, May 13 2005 (IPS) - As France’s Pascal Lamy appears well set to beat off a challenge from his Uruguayan rival for the top job at the World Trade Organisation, India’s food security campaigners and left-wing parties are furious over New Delhi’s support for the Frenchman’s candidacy.

As France’s Pascal Lamy appears well set to beat off a challenge from his Uruguayan rival for the top job at the World Trade Organisation, India’s food security campaigners and left-wing parties are furious over New Delhi’s support for the Frenchman’s candidacy.

They pointed out that India was ignoring years of bitter wrangling with the former European Union trade commissioner over such contentious issues as agricultural subsidies for EU farmers.

Devinder Sharma, an internationally-known food security campaigner and leader of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security (FBFS) recalled the ferocity with which Lamy tried to push such ideas as the ‘multi-functionality’ of agriculture at the WTO, ”while trying everything to get more rather than less subsidies for European farmers”.

Lamy’s strategy, said Sharma, has been to the advantage of the EU and the United States but detrimental to the interests of the G-20 countries.

Lamy, when he was EU trade commissioner, was once asked how will India protect the livelihood of its 600 million farmers if the European Union does not eliminate farm subsidies. In reply to this question, he quipped: ”That’s for your government to decide.”

”By supporting Lamy for WTO chief, India is sending a clear signal: ‘Farmers should get out of farming and join the ranks of landless labourers’,” a furious Sharma told IPS.

While Lamy, 58, has the backing of the EU’s 25 member states, his Uruguayan challenger Perez del Castillo, 60, gained the support of the 22 members of the Arab League and 12 nations of the South American community. All 148 member states of the WTO choose the director general, who serves a four-year term.

Current WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi, of Thailand, ends his term at the body on Aug. 31. The leadership contest entered its final stretch this week and a successor will be chosen by the weekend.

One of the first tasks of the new chief, who has little direct power but much potential influence, will be to help guide the WTO to success at its next ministerial conference in Hong Kong in December, when a draft deal on lowering barriers to trade is due to be approved.

A report in the ‘Times of India’ newspaper on Wednesday said in return for New Delhi’s support of Lamy, India was promised that its candidate would be given the post of deputy director general of the world trade body.

Sharma said with Lamy emerging as clear winner he saw tough times ahead for developing countries, because Lamy was known to have worked closely with former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. Zoellick currently holds the number two job in the U.S. State Department and has strongly endorsed Lamy’s candidature.

And it is precisely this picture of the strong hand of the U.S. behind Lamy that irks India’s left parties.

D. Raja, national secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI), part of a powerful group of communist parties that lends critical outside support to the Congress-led United Progress Alliance (UPA) government, said support for Lamy was precisely the sort of issue that has been creating differences within India’s ruling coalition.

”The support (for Lamy) seems bizzare,” added Raja.

The communists have buried serious differences with the Congress party of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in order to keep at bay the Hindu fundamentalist, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) out of power. Nonetheless, they have on several occasions threatened to withdraw support over economic policies particularly those concerning India’s 600 million farmers.

So far the communists have been able to rein in India’s tendency in recent years to support western rather than developing world interests at international forums notably on the issue of accessions to WTO patent rules earlier this year.

During his trips to India to garner support, the last of them in February, Lamy has made no secret of his closeness to Manmohan Singh, a former World Bank economist and the man responsible for initiating India’s difficult economic reforms process during a stint as finance minister between 1991 and 1996.

Apparently the links have been strong enough for India to ignore its commitments to the G-20 group of nations, which have major stakes in agriculture, and to ditch the candidate floated by alliance member Uruguay for the top WTO job.

But officials at the Commerce Ministry said India was not left with much of a choice after Brazilian candidate Luiz Felipe de Seixas Correa could not muster much support during the first round leaving the field open, in the second round, to Lamy who faced weak opposition from Mauritius Trade Minister Jaya Krishna Cuttarree and Castillo.

”With China, India, and South Africa joining hands, it seemed possible for Correa to cross the first round but he lacked support in his own Latin American region and Castillo does not have the same caliber,” the official said.

However, Correa had to withdraw under the 148-member body’s selection rules in which the candidate with least support is eliminated in successive rounds of consultations.

India has been asking for greater transparency in the selection process but rules framed in 2002 allow the general council, the dispute settlement body and the trade policy division to base assessments on such criteria as geographical support without revealing the actual number of members throwing their weight behind the candidates.

Indeed India’s ambassador in Geneva, Ujal Singh Bhatia was quoted telling journalists that he would have been happier if there was word on how much support each candidate had actually received in each of the successive rounds.

Lack of transparency was an issue during the contest between former New Zealand Prime Minister Mike Moore and Thailand’s former deputy prime minister Supachai in 1999. Moore and Supachai ended up serving three years each as compromise.

Observed the Indian official: ”In the end there was little difference between Moore and Supachai so far as the developing countries were concerned – Moore seemed closer to the EU and while Supachai appeared to be pro-U.S.”