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Note: This document is from the archive of the Africa Policy E-Journal, published by the Africa Policy Information Center (APIC) from 1995 to 2001 and by Africa Action from 2001 to 2003. APIC was merged into Africa Action in 2001. Please note that many outdated links in this archived document may not work.


Africa: Third World Network, 2

Africa: Third World Network, 2
Date distributed (ymd): 000202
Document reposted by APIC

+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++

Region: Continent-Wide
Issue Areas: +economy/development+
Summary Contents:
This posting and the previous one contain in two parts a presentation by the Third World Network at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. For more information and background analysis from the Third World Network, see the Third World Network web site (http://www.twnside.org.sg). For earlier statements by Third World Network Africa, enter "Third World Network" into the search box at the Africa Policy web site (http://www.africapolicy.org/search.htm).

+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Rethinking Liberalisation and Reshaping the WTO

Presentation by Martin Khor (Director, Third World Network), at the World Economic Forum, Davos, 28 Jan 2000

(continued from part 1)

Problems Caused by Some Agreements

Agriculture Agreement

The Agriculture Agreement could have severe negative effects on many Third World countries. Most of them (excepting the least developed countries) will have to reduce domestic subsidies to farmers and remove non-tariff controls on agricultural products, converting these to tariffs and then progressively reducing these tariffs. This will impose global competition on the domestic farm sector. Farmers unable to compete with cheaper imports may not survive. Hundreds of millions of small Third World farmers could be affected. There is also a category of developing countries which are net food importers; as subsidies for food production are progressively reduced in the developed countries, the prices of their exports may increase; the net food importers may thus face rising food import bills.

A recent FAO study of the experience of 16 developing countries in implementing the Uruguay Round agriculture agreement concluded that, "A common reported concern was with a general trend towards the concentration of farms. In the virtual absence of safety nets, the process also marginalised small producers and added to unemployment and poverty. Similarly most studies pointed to continued problems of adjustment. As an example, the rice and sugar sectors in Senegal were facing difficulties in coping with import competition despite the substantive devaluation in 1994." (FAO Paper, Experience with the implementation of the Uruguay Round agreement on agriculture, synthesis of country case studies, Sept 1999, prepared by FAO's Commodities and Trade Division).

Many developing countries during the preperations for Seattle have proposed to amend the Agriculture Agreement to take into account their problems of implementation. In most developing countries, small farmers form a large part of population. Their livelihoods and products (especially food) are the main basis of Third World economies. These livelihoods could be threatened by agricultural liberalisation under the agriculture agreement. Local food production could also be threatened by cheaper imports. Developing countries would then become more dependent on imports for their food supplies, thus eroding national food security.

To deal with these two serious problems, many developing countries (including India, Indonesia, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Zimbabwe, El Salvador etc) have proposed that developing countries be given flexibility in implementing their obligations on the grounds of the need for food security, defence of rural livelihoods and poverty alleviation. They proposed that that in developing countries, food produced for domestic consumption and the products of small farmers shall be exempted from the Agriculture Agreement's disciplines on import liberalisation, domestic support and subsidies.

The TRIMS (Trade Related Investment Measures) Agreement

In the TRIMS Agreement, "investment measures" such as local content (obliging foreign firms to use at least a specified minimal amount of local inputs) will be prohibited for most developing countries from Jan. 2000. This would prevent them from maintaining policies they have had to promote the local firms, to enable greater linkages to the domestic economy, and to protect the balance of payments. Developing countries need these policies because of the low level of development of the local sector, which would not be able to withstand free competition at this stage. Thus, by implementing TRIMS, developing countries will lose some important policy options to pursue their industrialisation.

In the review of the TRIMS Agreement, which is scheduled to begin in 1999, the problems of implementation for developing countries should be highlighted. Tle prohibition of "local content" requirement (i.e. that firms or projects make use of a certain minimum amount of local materials) will seriously hinder the efforts of developing countries to promote local industry, save on foreign exchange, and upgrade local technological capacity. There is also a prohibition on investment measures that limit the import of inputs by firms to a certain percentage of their exports. Such measures had been introduced to protect the country's balance of payments. The prohibition of these two investment measures will make the attainment of development goals much more difficult.

The TRIMS Agreement should be amended to allow developing countries the right to have "local content" policy and to limit the import of inputs to a certain percentage of a firm's exports.

Several developing countries (including Brazil, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Uganda, Egypt) have been demanding in the pre-Seattle negotiations in the WTO in Geneva that TRIMS be amended to provide developing countries the flexibility to continue using such investment measures to meet their development goals.

TRIPS (Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement

The South's collective loss was most acutely felt in the agreement on TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) through which countries are obliged to introduce IPR legislation with standards of protection that are similar to Northern countries. This will hinder Southern countries' indigenous technological development. It should be noted that the present industrial countries did not have patent or IPR laws, or laws as strict as will now be imposed through TRIPS, during their industrialising period, and this enabled them to incorporate technology design originating from abroad in their local systems.

The agreement will also give rise to increasing technical payments such as royalties and license fees to TNCs owning most of the world's patents.

The new IPR regime will also have significant impact on raising the prices of many products. By restricting competition, the IPR rules will enable some companies to jack up prices of their products far beyond costs and thus earn rents in terms of monopoly revenues and profits. This is clearly seen in the case of computer software.

Also, most Third World countries have in the past exempted agriculture, medicines and other essential products and processes from their national patent laws, but with the passage of TRIPS, everything is subject to IPRs unless explicitly exempted. The prices of medicines are expected to shoot up in many countries, and foreign drug sales will increase rapidly at the expense of local products.

The TRIPS agreement also opens the door to the patenting of lifeforms such as microorganisms and modified genetic materials, thus providing the boost in incentives so much desired by the biotechnology industry. Many environmentalists are concerned that this will be detrimental to the global environment as the present lack of controls and accountability in biotechnology research and application will likely accelerate biodiversity loss and could threaten natural ecosystems.

For plant varieties, TRIPS does permit countries the option to either introduce patents or an alternative "effective" sui generis system of intellectual property protection. This has to be implemented by Jan. 2000. Many farmers' groups (especially in India, where huge farmers' demonstrations and rallies have been held against GATT/WTO) and environmentalists are concerned that in the end Third World farmers will be disallowed the traditional practice of saving seed for the next season's planting (if the seed used is under the intellectual protection of a company) but forced to purchase the seeds from companies.

Given these many problems, the TRIPS agreement should be amended to take into account development, social and environmental concerns. Meanwhile, the grace period before implementation should be extended. Many developing countries have made formal proposals before and at Seattle that a review of TRIPS along these lines be made and that there should be an extension of the implementation dateline. So far the US and EU have turned down these requests, insisting that the laws already created cannot be changed.

Recently there have been calls from some eminent economists and from some NGOs to take the TRIPS Agreement out of WTO altogether. TRIPS is a protectionist device, and should have no place in an organisation that is supposed to be committed to liberalisation. Moreover IPRs is not a trade issue. By locating it in the trade system, the road is open to overload the WTO with more and more non-trade issues.

Conclusion

These are only a few examples of how developing countries are facing immense problems now and especially in future. They are unable to absorb the changes they are required to make to their economic and social policies. Thus many of the countries are correctly arguing that they need time to digest the Uruguay Round, that some of the rules that are unfair and that generate serious problems should be reviewed, and that until these are satisfactorily resolved there should not be fresh demands on them to liberalise further, especially through new issues such as investment and government procurement.

Given the serious problems faced by developing countries in implementing their Uruguay Round commitments (and in the developed countries not properly implementing their commitments), there should be a review of many of the Agreements with a view to amending them. In fact many of the Agreements themselves mandate that reviews be carried out four or five years after their coming into force.

The next three to five years of the WTO's activities should focus on the review process, so that the opportunity to rectify the defects of the Agreements can be taken. This review process would in itself be a massive task, involving analyses of the weaknesses of the various Agreements, assessments of how they have affected or will affect developing countries, proposals to amend the Agreements, and negotiations on these proposals.

V: Why the Wto Should Not Take on New Issues

A major reason for the failure at Seattle was the reluctance and refusal of many developing countries for allowing the WTO to be given the mandate to take on more new issues for negotiating new agreements, which had been proposed by some of the developed countries. Saying no to the proposed new issues makes much sense.

If the WTO is to improve its already poor credibility, it should focus in the next few years on reviewing problems of implementing the Agreements and make the necessary changes in the agreements. These will be enormous tasks. They will not be properly carried out if there is a proliferation of new issues in a new Round. The extremely limited human, technical and financial resources of developing countries and their diplomats and policy makers would be diverted away from the review process to defending their interests in the negotiations on new issues. The limited time of the WTO would also be mainly engaged in the new issues.

There will be little time for examining, reviewing and improving the existing agreements, and the problems arising from their implementation will increase through time and accumulate, and manifest themselves in social and economic dislocation and political instability in many countries.

If this is not enough, most of the proposed new issues would also have the most serious consequences for the South's future development. Issues such as investment rules, competition policy and government procurement do not belong in the WTO (which is supposed to be a trade organisation) in the first place. They are sought to be placed there by the developed countries to take advantage of the enforcement capability (the dispute settlement system) of the WTO, so that disciplines can be effectively put on developing countries to open their economies to the goods, services and companies of the developed countries. Other issues relate to labour, social and environment standards. These too should not enter the WTO as issues to be negotiated into new agreements. If they do so, then these issues are likely to be made use of by developed countries as protectionist devices against the products and services of developing countries.

Should the developed countries continue to push and pressure for these new issues, then the WTO will continue to be split, and moreover other pressing issues such as the problems resulting from the existing Agreements would not be tackled. Developing countries should therefore not accept and developed countries should refrain from the injection of these new areas into the WTO.

VI: Conclusions

The multilateral trade system faces a crisis and a crossroads. To resolve the crisis of identity and credibility, the following should be considered:

1. Review the record of liberalisation and take a more realistic approach. This requires a slowdown or stop to pressures being put on developing countries for further liberalisation. After all, if the developed countries continue after so many years to maintain such high protection in agriculture, textiles and some industrial products (and argue that they need more toime to adjust), they have no basis to insist that developing countries must continuously liberalise in services or industrial products on the supposed ground that such liberalisation is automatically good for them.

Reassert the objective of the trade system as primarily the development of developing countries which form the majority of the membership. Liberalisation or "free trade" should not be the operational aim. The goal should be development. Therefore there should be a shift of emphasis away from removing what is considered "trade distorting", to instead removing the obstacles to development, or to review and rectify policies or practices that are "development distorting." The goal and dimension of development must be primary in WTO rules and assessment of proposals or measures. The "special and differential treatment" principle should be greatly strengthened operationally, far beyond its present weak state.

The problems of implementation of the Uruguay Round agreements should be given the top priority at the WTO. There is a danger that after the Seattle failure, these problems will again be sidelined as the focus is given to the problem of participation and transparency. It must be recognised that the main cause of the Seattle failure was the disillusionment of many developing countries with the inequities of the rules and the negative effects these would have on their economies and societies. To restore credibility to the trading system in the eyes of developing countries, the following should be done:

(a) Developed countries should take measures to greatly increase market access for developing countries' products, such as in agriculture, textiles and industrial products (where there are now high tariffs); moreover they should stop taking protectionist measures such as anti-dumping measures;

(b) In the many areas where developing countries face problems in implementing their obligations (such as in TRIMS, TRIPS, agriculture), a review and change of the existing rules should be done on an urgent basis. For a start, the sets of proposals put forward by developing countries during the preparations for Seattle (many of which are contained in the draft Ministerial text of 19 Oct and more are contained in the compilation of proposals) should be treated with urgency by the WTO General Council. A mechanism should be set up to consider these proposals and to rectify the problems (including through amending the agreements) as soon as possible;

(c) In the meanwhile, where the transition period for developing countries has expired (for example, in TRIPS and TRIMS), an extension should be given at least until the review process is completed. There should also be a moratorium on bringing dispute cases against developing countries on issues where the reviews are taking place.

4. Serious consideration should also be given to trimming the WTO so that it can carry out its tasks of regulating trade relations for the benefit especially of developing countries. In areas where it has accumulated a mandate that is inappropriate, steps should be considered to hive off these aspects. For example, it should be seriously discussed whether the TRIPS agreement should remain within the WTO.

5. There should not be pressures to introduce new issues such as investment, competition, procurement, labour and environmental standards as these would overload the system further and lead to tremendous systemic stress and great tensions and divisions in the organisation.

6. The system and culture of decision making in the WTO must undergo serious reform. This cannot be done in a rush but has to be considered carefully, in a process in which all Members have full participation rights. The exclusive Green Room meetings (which do not have the mandate of the full Membership, and which are not officially announced, nor are the results of the meetings made generally known) should be discontinued. Manipulative methods (such as at Seattle where chairpersons of groups declared there was a consensus view when there was none, or when points made by some members are ignored) should stop. At meetings where issues are discussed and drafts are made and negotiated, there should be transparency and participation, where each Member is given the right to be present and to make proposals. Even if some system of group representation is considered, all Members should be allowed to be present at meetings and have participation rights. The Secretariat should also be impartial and seen to be impartial. Whatever results from the reform process, if there is one, the system should reflect the fact that the majority of Members are now from developing countries which have as much stake or more in a truly fair and balanced multilateral system as the developed countries, and therefore the system must be able to provide the developing countries with the means with which to voice their interests and exercise their rights.


This material is being reposted for wider distribution by the Africa Policy Information Center (APIC). APIC's primary objective is to widen international policy debates around African issues, by concentrating on providing accessible policy-relevant information and analysis usable by a wide range of groups and individuals.

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