WTO Review: Delegates Conflate Fair Trade with Market Access
| | RISQ Reviews | 07 September 2003 |
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Author: M.H.J. van den Berg
 One of the most controversial agreements to be negotiated at the conference of World Trade Organisation (WTO) members this year in Cancun (10-14 September), is the Agreement on Agriculture. The stakes are high, as any revision of the rules pertaining to the trade in agricultural products would most certainly bear consequences for the array of protective measures and subsidies that all members uphold.
Typically, WTO negotiations pit the rich, developed countries in the North against the developing South, with the former pushing for trade liberalisation. This time, however, it is the other way around. It are the poorer countries that are pressing the rich ones, most notably the U.S. and the E.U., to open up their markets.
At least so it seems, as WTO delegates from the South, backed by campaigns and lobby efforts on the part of Northern NGOs, such as Oxfam International, have called on rich countries to stop protecting their heavily subsidised agricultural sectors. Most recently, Brazilian WTO delegate Felipe de Seixas Correa, speaking on behalf of 17 developing countries, warned that without a serious commitment from the U.S. and the E.U. to better market access, the Cancun conference is bound to fail.
Yet as critics of Oxfam’s high profile global trade campaign have already pointed out, those who call for better market access to achieve fair trade for the poor may, in fact, get more than they bargain for. After all, years of subsidy have put the North’s agro-industry in an excellent position to exploit a general agreement on trade liberalisation. The dumping of cheap food has already distorted markets in developing countries for years, leaving domestic producers unable to compete at home, let alone on the world market.
However, the most recent draft of the Agreement on Agriculture, prepared for the Cancun meeting by Carlos Pérez del Castillo, chairman of the WTO’s General Council, has bracketed all references to issues such as agricultural dumping or market concentration. But then, neither does an alternative draft put forward by the Brazil-led group of 17 provide much in the way of addressing these issues.
Hence, even if the conference in Cancun this week will somehow manage to come up with an Agreement on Agriculture, fair trade in agricultural products is unlikely to materialise, as long as WTO delegates do not address the damage already done to millions of small producers due to decades of market distorting practices by a few privileged agro-industrial conglomerates.
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Published on 07 September 2003 by RISQ
© M.H.J. van den Berg | www.risq.org
All rights reserved.
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