[Ip-health] Evo Morales On the WTO’s round of negot iations 17 July 2008

[Riaz K Tayob]

EVO MORALES, PRESIDENT OF BOLIVIA
On the WTO’s round of negotiations July 2008

International trade can play a major role in the promotion of economic
development and the alleviation of poverty. We recognize the need for
all our peoples to benefit from the increased opportunities and welfare
gains that the multilateral trading system generates. The majority of
WTO members are developing countries. We seek to place their needs and
interests at the heart of the Work Programme adopted in this Declaration.
Doha World Trade Organization Ministerial Declaration, November 14, 2001

With these words began the WTO round of negotiations seven years ago.
In reality, are economic development, the alleviation of poverty, the
needs of all our peoples, the increased opportunities for developing
countries at the centre of the current negotiations at the WTO?

First I must say that if it were so, all 153 member countries and in
particular, the wide majority of developing countries should be the main
actors in the WTO negotiations.  But what we are seeing is that a
handful of 35 countries are invited by the Director-General to informal
meetings so that they advance significantly in the negotiations and
prepare the agreements of this WTO “Development Round”.

The WTO negotiations have turned into a fight by developed countries to
open markets in developing countries to favor their big companies.

The agricultural subsidies in the North, which mainly go to agricultural
and food companies in the US and Europe, will not only continue but will
actually increase, as demonstrated by the 2008 Farm Bill[1]  in the
United States.  The developing countries will lower tariffs on their
agricultural products while the real subsidies[2]   applied by the US or
the EU to their agricultural products will not decline.

As for industrial products in the WTO negotiations, developing countries
are being asked to cut their tariffs by 40% to 60% while developed
countries will, on average, cut their tariffs by 25% to 33%.

For countries like Bolivia the erosion of trade preferences due to the
overall lowering of tariffs will have negative effects on the
competitiveness of our exports.

The recognition of asymmetries, and the real and effective special and
differential treatment in favor of developing countries is limited and
obstructed when implemented by developed countries.

In the negotiations, there is a push towards the liberalization of new
services sectors by countries when we should be definitely excluding
basic services in education, health, water, energy and
telecommunications from the text of the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade
in Services.  These services are human rights that cannot be objects of
private commercial relations and of liberalization rules that lead to
privatization.

The deregulation and privatization of financial services, among others,
are the cause of the current global financial crisis.  Further
liberalization of services will not bring about more development, but
greater probabilities for a crisis and speculation on vital matters such
as food.

The intellectual property regime established by the WTO has most of all
benefited transnational corporations that monopolize patents, thus
making medicines and other vital products more expensive, promoting the
privatization and commercialization of life itself, as evidenced by the
various patents on plants, animals and even human genes.

The poorest countries will be the main losers.  The economic projections
of a potential WTO agreement, carried out even by the World Bank,[3]
indicate that the cumulative costs of the loss in employment, the
restrictions to national policymaking and the loss in tariff revenues
will be greater than the “gains” from the “Development Round”.

After seven years, the WTO round is anchored in the past and out of date
with the most important phenomena we are currently living:  the food
crisis, the energy crisis, climate change and the elimination of
cultural diversity.  The world is being led to believe that an agreement
is needed to resolve the global agenda and this agreement does not
correspond to that reality.  Its bases are not appropriate to resist
this new global agenda.

Studies by the FAO point out that with the current forces of
agricultural production it is possible to feed 12 billion human beings,
in other words, almost more than double the current world population.
However, there is a food crisis because production is not geared towards
the well-being of humans but towards the market, speculation and
profitability of the big producers and marketers of food. To deal with
the food crisis, it is necessary to strengthen family, peasant and
community agriculture. Developing countries have to recover the right to
regulate[4]  our imports and exports to guarantee our populations’ food
supply.  We have to end consumerism, waste and luxuries.  In the poorest
part of the planet, millions of human beings die of hunger every year.
In the richest part of the planet, millions of dollars are spent to
combat obesity.  We consume in excess, waste natural resources and we
produce the waste that pollutes Mother Earth.

Countries should prioritize the consumption of what we produce locally.
A product that travels half around the world to reach its destiny can be
cheaper than other that is produced domestically, but, if we take into
account the environmental costs of transporting that merchandise, the
energy consumption and the quantity of carbon emissions that it
generates, then we can reach the conclusion that it is healthier for the
planet and for humanity to prioritize the consumption of what is
produced locally.

Foreign trade must be a complement to local production.  In no way can
we favor foreign markets at the expense of national production.
Capitalism wants to make us all uniform so that we turn into mere
consumers.  For the North there is only one development model, theirs.
The uniform models of economic development are accompanied by processes
of generalized acculturation to impose on us one single culture, one
single fashion, one single way of thinking and of seeing things.  To
destroy a culture, to threaten the identity of a people, is the greatest
damage that can be done to humanity.
The respect and the peaceful and harmonic complementarity of the various
cultures and economies is essential to save the planet, humanity and life.
For this to be in fact, a round of negotiations about development and
anchored in the present and future of humanity and the planet it should:
•     Guarantee the participation of developing countries in all WTO
meetings, thus ending exclusive meetings in the “green room”.[5]

•     Implement true asymmetric negotiations in favor of developing
countries in which the developed countries make effective concessions.

•     Respect the interests of developing countries without limiting
their capacity to define and implement national policies in agriculture,
industry and services.

•     Effectively reduce the protectionist measures and subsidies of
developed countries.[6] 6>

•     Insure that the right of developing countries to protect their
infant industries, for as long as necessary, in the same manner that
industrialized countries did in the past.

•     Guarantee the right of developing countries to regulate and define
their policies in the services sector, explicitly excluding basic
services from the General Agreement on Trade in Services of the WTO.

•     Limit the monopolies of large corporations on intellectual
property, foster the transfer of technology and prohibit the patenting
of all forms of life.

•     Guarantee the countries’ food sovereignty, eliminating any
limitation to the ability of the States to regulate food exports and
imports.

•     Adopt measures that contribute to limit consumerism, the wasting
of natural resources, the elimination of greenhouse gases and the
creation of waste that harms Mother Earth.


In the 21st century, a “Development round” can no longer be about “free
trade”, but it rather has to promote a kind of trade that contributes to
the equilibrium between countries, regions and mother nature,
establishing indicators that allow for an evaluation and correction of
trade rules in terms of sustainable development.

We, the governments, have an enormous responsibility with our peoples.
Agreements such as the ones in the WTO have to be widely known and
debated by all citizens and not only by ministers, businessmen and
“experts”.  We, the peoples of the world, have to stop being passive
victims of these negotiations and turn into main actors of our present
and future.
Evo Morales Ayma
President of Bolivia


[1]   The 2008 Farm Bill was approved on May 22 by the US Congress.  It
authorizes spending that includes subsidies to agriculture of up to 307
billion dollars in 5 years.  Of these, there will be approximately 208
billion dollars that can be spent on food programs.

[2]   The current text in Agriculture proposes the reduction of US
subsidies by a range between 13 and 16.4 billion dollars per year.
However, the real subsidies that will actually apply to the US are of
approximately 7 billion dollars per year.  On the other hand, the
European Union is offering in the WTO negotiations the reform it carried
out in 2003 to its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), without proposing
further opening.

[3]   Developing countries have little to gain in the WTO Round: the
projected gains are of 0.2% for these countries, the reduction in world
poverty is of 2.5 million (less than 1% of the world’s poor) and the
losses due to forgone tariff revenues will be of at least 63 billion
dollars. (Anderson, Martin, and van der Mensbrugghe, “Market and Welfare
Implications of Doha Reform Scenarios,” in Agricultural Trade Reform and
the Doha Development Agenda, Anderson and Martin, World Bank in Back to
the Drawing Board: No Basis for Concluding the Doha Round of
Negotiations" by Kevin P. Gallagher and Timothy A. Wise, RIS Policy
Brief #36).

[4]   This regulation must include the right to implement taxes on
exports, to lower tariffs to favor imports, ban exports, subsidize
domestic production, establish price bands, and in short, any measure
that, given each developing country’s reality, better suits the purpose
of guaranteeing the population’s food supply.

[5]   The green room meetings is the name of the informal negotiation
meetings at the WTO in which a group of 35 countries selected by the
Director-General participates.

[6] 6>  A real cut in agricultural subsidies in the US would have to
reduce them to less than 7 billion dollars per year.