The Wto Cancun Conference:  A Post-Mortem Analysis

The fight for a genuine alternative to unfair trade worldwide remains and grows.  It is the developing anti-globalization and anti-imperialist movement that through its radical critique of the WTO, among others, is educating the world's people on global injustices, and is establishing itself as the alternative to this old and unjust order.  It is people like the martyr Lee and tens of thousands like him inspired by the ideal of global equality and justice that represent real change and the wave of a new global future.

By Ricco Alejandro M. Santos
Bulatlat.com

For a few weeks this past year, 56-year-old Korean farmer leader Lee Kyung Hae, sat in front of the headquarters of the World Trade Organization, handing out anti-globalization leaflets and clinging to his placard that read "WTO Kills Farmers."  Last Sept. 10, that statement would find new meaning.  Climbing to the top of a fence blocking out thousands of protesters, he plunged a dagger into his heart in protest against the World Trade Organization conference in Cancun, Mexico and collapsed lifeless to the ground below.  Within five days the whole Cancun conference collapsed itself--a fitting outcome to Lee's supreme sacrifice.

On Sept. 15, after five days of deadlock, the Kenyan delegate representing a number of African governments walked out of the talks.  Sensing a total stalemate, the Mexican trade minister chairing the talks declared the end of the conference.

Even before Sept. 15, the talks were already building up into a confrontation between two major demands:  the call of third world governments to the monopoly-capitalist governments, especially those of the United States and the European Union, to made good their promise to remove domestic and export subsidies enjoyed by their homeland agriculture; and the drive of the monopoly-capitalist powers to push for even further liberalization in areas such as foreign investment.

The Cancun conference was supposed to be a midway landmark in the current Doha round of talks of the WTO trade negotiations.  In Doha, Qatar in 2001, amid growing public protests over dumping of surplus European and U.S. farm products in neocolonial countries, the monopoly-capitalist powers dangled the prospects of cutting the agricultural subsidies, which had reached a whopping $280 billion in 1997, and rose even higher to US$362 billion in 1998.  

Subsidies such as these have helped boost farm exports such as European beet sugar and U.S. cotton, drive down world sugar and cotton prices, and ruin and bring to starvation tens of millions of third world peasants such as African cotton growers and Filipino and Latino sugar tenants and cane cutters.   The Doha round was packaged as a "development" round, during which the global capitalist interests were ready and willing to make major trade concessions that would lift hundreds of millions of Asian, African and Latin people, including peasants, out of dire poverty. 

Doha “sweetener”

Aside from the Doha sweetener of "development," the monopoly-capitalist powers promised "democracy" in Cancun.   Routine in previous negotiations was the brand of imperialist diplomacy practiced by the U.S., European and Canadian missions.   American, Canadian and European negotiators held exclusive meetings (notoriously known among anti-globalization protestors as "Green Round” meetings) with small groups of third world delegates, hoping to either bribe them with new promises of trade privileges, or pressure them with threats of trade sanctions.  The tactic was aimed at dividing the third world governments and preempting opposition to the globalization agenda. WTO officials would arbitrarily appoint facilitators and committee chairs and the respective chairs and facilitators would present eleventh-hours drafts on a take-it-or-leave-it basis in total violation of the principle of democratic consultation and discussion.  To facilitate this manipulation and lack of transparency, WTO leaders neither presented rules and procedures for discussion nor held discussions to decide on procedures ensuring that all third world governments be allowed to be heard.   Before, it was promised that the WTO would henceforth uphold democracy by eliminating the policy of handpicking leaders by an elite and manipulating the passage of midnight draft texts.  

But the Cancun fiasco has proven the development and democratic rhetoric and image-building to be a hoax.  The old conspiratorial methods continued in Cancun, with the notoriously anti-third-world Canadian International Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew appointed arbitrarily to chair the discussion of "Singapore issues," which embraced investment.

Led by U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick and E.U. Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, the U.S. and E.U. missions also stonewalled on the demand for eliminating its massive farm subsidies, as promised by the monopoly-capitalist powers in the Doha.  What the conference proved was that the corporate superpowers merely was using these previous promises as tactical bait to trap third-world regimes into giving in to the latest major counter-demands, especially wider legal concessions for foreign direct investments. 

Dangled

But even before Cancun, these promises had already served their purpose.  These were earlier dangled to the third-world governments and peoples to make previous globalization measures, especially opening up third-world economies to American and European farm products, appear less disadvantageous to the third world.    The policy of liberalizing farm imports and the intensified battering of third world agriculture by farm imports was sold to the public with the pseudo-liberal argument that anyway, third world agriculture could equalize through stepped up and freer exports into capitalist countries. 

The resistance to even wider collective opening up of third world economies to foreign direct investment already reflects the depth and severity of the crisis of these economies aggravated by earlier globalization.  The crisis has reached a point that under the pressure of anti-globalization protest and in the face of massive dislocation, third world regimes are forced to go through the motion of contesting the trade inequalities by opposing the farm subsidies.  The logic of this exercise is that:  since neocolonial regimes have already opened up their own economies to capitalist exports, so should the megacapitalist governments open up their economies by removing their farm and export subsidies.   However, this exercise is meant to merely reinforce the pseudo-liberal deception that the monopoly-capitalist powers are actually open, willing and benevolent enough through negotiation to dismantle their monopoly advantages.    

It is in effect meant to mask the reality that trade inequalities and monopolies vis-à-vis the third world are built-in requirements of monopoly capitalism, and not simply options that can be bargained or horse-traded away.

Third world crime

On the other hand, by officially opposing further liberalization of foreign investments, many third world regimes like the Philippines appear to absolve themselves from their previous and continuing crime of approving and perpetuating pro-globalization policies inimical to their countries' interests. 

Third world countries face the bitter reality of steadily deteriorating semifeudal poverty, unemployment, out-migration, and low productivity largely caused by the already installed policies of globalization. 

As even set globalization policies already result in daily worsening of third world economies, even greater globalization in the form of import and trade liberalization as well as privatization further accelerate this downward spiral.  The past series of WTO conferences has greatly contributed to this process.  This situation and trend is so severe that the lack of any new agreement in Cancun has been already heralded as a victory for the people of the third world, despite the actual situation of continuous economic decline outside the luxury tourist haven that is Cancun.  It is in this sense that trade diplomacy has served as both a charade and a farce.

But the world crisis has so escalated and affected the WTO itself that even this farcical trade diplomacy cannot continue in the old way.  Backed by the Chinese capitalist government, trade representatives of the governments of semifeudal Brazil and India have led a bloc of negotiators that in Cancun have neutralized the drive of the U.S. and European missions to simply railroad a WTO agreement on foreign investments. 

China’s power

Observers have attributed the newfound relative strength of this negotiating bloc to the power of China.  Relatively new, Chinese capitalism has less monopolist vested interest than U.S., European or Japanese monopoly capitalism in asserting control over third world economies through fully-owned foreign direct investments.  As a result, it has created a crack in the trade diplomacy of capitalist imperialism. 

However, it is not this trade negotiating bloc that offers hope for a just world trade and investment order.  In the same way that WTO trade diplomacy can conjure the illusion of fundamental transformation of world trade through the WTO, the rise of the new negotiating bloc could serve as a façade of equal power and a smokescreen for the real continuing domination of the capitalist superpowers. Even Zoellick has boasted in the wake of the Cancun debacle that what it cannot obtain in trade liberalization that easily in the WTO, it can do so bilaterally, enticing, bribing or arm-twisting third world regimes individually, as what the U.S. government did with Mexico itself and the EU has done with almost all Middle Eastern and north African regimes, or regionally, as what the Bush regime is planning to do with a U.S.-Middle Eastern "free trade" area targeted in 10 years.

But the fight for a genuine alternative to unfair trade worldwide remains and grows.  It is the developing anti-globalization and anti-imperialist movement that through its radical critique of the WTO, among others, is educating the world's people on global injustices, and is establishing itself as the alternative to this old and unjust order.  It is people like the martyr Lee and tens of thousands like him inspired by the ideal of global equality and justice that represent real change and the wave of a new global future. Bulatlat.com

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