Source: Susan Joekes [1999].

Table 2

Female wages as percentage of male wages

Source: ILO 1998.

Note: The data refer to an average of years for which data were available in the 1990s.

Doha Round: Development content Must Not be Diluted

Even as the WTO’s Doha Round trade negotiations stand suspended, the ministries of trade around the world are active in reviving the talks. Ministers and high officials of several developing country coalitions such as the G-20, G-33, the ACP Group, the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) Group, the African Group, the Small, Vulnerable Economies (SVEs), the Cotton-4, and NAMA-11, met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 9 September to discuss taking the process forward. They are ready to re-engage in the talks but at the same time preserve the development content of this round. Following is their joint statement.

1. "We, Ministers and High Officials of the G-20 countries and, as special guests, the coordinators of the G-33, the ACP Group, the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) Group, the African Group, the Small, Vulnerable Economies (SVEs), the Cotton-4, and NAMA-11, met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 9 September 2006, to consider the situation of the negotiations in the Doha Round. We deeply regret that the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda negotiations have been suspended. This is a setback for a Round that is to place development and agriculture at the heart of the multilateral trading system. Not only the Round is threatened, but the multilateral trading system itself now faces a serious crisis. This is an unacceptable situation for all developing countries.

2. Agriculture lies at the center of the Doha Development Agenda. Most of the world’s poor make their living out of agriculture. Their livelihood and standards of living are seriously jeopardized by the subsidies and market access barriers prevailing in international agricultural trade. Any Round that would be faithful to its development dimension must urgently redress this situation.

3. At such a critical juncture, we reaffirm our willingness to join efforts with a view to ensuring that WTO negotiations in agriculture live up to the commitments of the Doha Mandate. This would entail results that guarantee substantial and effective reduction in trade-distorting domestic support coupled with necessary disciplines to prevent box-shifting and product-shifting of support; substantial improvement in market access; and expeditious elimination of all forms of export subsidies.

4. We underscore the importance of Special and Differential treatment (S&D) for developing countries in all areas of the negotiations. In this context, we emphasize the overall proportionality in the reduction commitments and the vital role of special products (SPs) and the special safeguard mechanism (SSM) in addressing the food security, rural development and livelihood concerns of developing countries. We reiterate our determination to achieve a balanced and proportionate outcome with a comparable high level of ambition both in agriculture and in NAMA, as agreed under Paragraph 24 of the Hong-Kong Ministerial Declaration.

5. We recall the pledge made at Doha to place the interests and needs of developing countries, especially the least-developed among them, at the heart of the Round. We reiterate our shared interest in a pro-development outcome of the Round and we highlight the indivisibility of such a development agenda, in particular the need to preserve a balanced and proportionate level of ambition.

6. We recognize the urgent need to make operational the Hong Kong Ministerial Decision on Duty Free and Quota Free market access for the LDCs, as well as the simplification of rules of origin applicable to them. We reaffirm the need to address the issue of cotton ambitiously, expeditiously and specifically in its trade-related and developments aspects. We stress the need to address the concerns of recently acceded developing Members and trade-related issues raised by SVEs. We further recognize the need to address the issue of tropical products and products of particular importance to the diversification of production. We fully recognize the importance of long-standing preferences and the need to address the issue of preference erosion.

7. We welcome the recommendations of the WTO Task Force for operationalizing Aid for Trade which emphasize, inter alia, the need for having additional, predictable, sustainable, unconditioned and effective financing. We, therefore, urge WTO Members to expeditiously consider implementing the recommendations of the Task Force on a fast track and stand alone basis at the national, regional and global levels. We also urge the Director General to pursue his consultations with donor community for securing additional financial resources under Aid for Trade.

8. We stress that the only acceptable outcome is one that fully delivers on the Doha commitments as complemented by the July Framework and by the Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration. Therefore, any attempt to renegotiate or rewrite these would not be acceptable.

9. Developed members, in particular the major trading countries, bear a special and specific responsibility for the outcome of the Round. They must show their readiness to implement measures that remove trade distortions and significantly open their markets. Their current positions do not provide an adequate basis for leading the negotiations to a successful conclusion. They must, therefore, significantly improve their proposals especially in the two crucial areas of domestic support and agriculture market access, as well as be prepared to deliver on the development dimension of the DDA.

10. We note that the substantial political and technical work carried out until now provides a solid platform for the eventual resumption of the negotiations. We reaffirm that our countries remain committed to an ambitious, balanced, pro-development outcome for the Round and we are prepared to contribute to that end. This will strengthen the multilateral trading system and inscribe development at its heart. We confirm our readiness to re-engage immediately in the negotiations and to work towards its prompt resumption.

11. Ministers and High Officials urge the Director-General of the WTO to intensify the process of consultations with Member countries, in an inclusive and transparent manner in order to create the necessary conditions for the prompt resumption of the negotiations with a view to arriving at an agreement on full modalities and final commitments that is ambitious, balanced, and pro-development."

WTO: An Opportunity for a Better Trading System

"The collapse of the Doha round talks in the WTO is an opportunity to set a new course. It is a chance for rich countries to rebuild trust with poorer countries. It is a chance for the WTO to rethink its role in the multilateral system." That is the opinion of Carin Smaller and Anne-Laure Constantin of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). They say governments need to make the WTO work cooperatively with UN institutions, looking to integrate trade into long-standing obligations to respect and promote human rights, to protect and rehabilitate our polluted planet and natural resource base, and to end the scourge of poverty. Following are extracts from their article published last month.

Putting Trade into Perspective: how to deal with the disappointment

The WTO is at a crossroads. The Doha Agenda, launched in 2001, and tasked to put development at its centre, is in a state of crisis. In July WTO members decided to suspend the Doha negotiations indefinitely and to take time-out for a period of reflection. The temptation is strong to think small and simply use this time to stay within the current framework and play around with numbers. If this happens, the status quo, or worse, will remain. If, however, WTO members take the time needed to refocus their negotiations and rethink the model of trade needed to support development and employment objectives, trade rules have the potential make significant improvements to our world.

Since the WTO was established in 1995, developing country members have consistently demanded that new trade rules address development concerns. In 2001, in the wake of September 11 attacks in the U.S., the Doha Development Agenda was launched, full of fine-sounding promises to put development at the heart of reforming the trading system. But even before the Doha Agenda was agreed, it was clear that neither of the two dominant players at the WTO, the U.S. and the EU, had really responded to the demands of developing countries. The interests of transnational corporations remained at the heart of the Doha Agenda: maximizing market access while protecting intellectual property rights. The current collapse can be linked back to mistakes made when WTO members agreed to the Doha Agenda.

When the suspension was announced by the WTO Director-General, Pascal Lamy, to WTO members at the General Council, many developing countries reacted with deep disappointment. Understandably so: the existing system is deeply flawed and impedes efforts by developing countries to tackle poverty and promote development. There are significant inequalities built into the system, inequalities that discriminate against the very countries that most need support.

Few developing countries were happy with the direction of negotiations, especially as it became clear that developed countries were still not ready to really open up their textile and agricultural sectors. Nonetheless, these countries had put an enormous amount of effort into the negotiations, and they know they are stronger in multilateral negotiations than they are in bilateral and regional deals where the richest countries are involved.

There is pressure from many sides to restart the talks soon. Pascal Lamy will continue to consult with members. Bilateral meetings between various members started almost immediately after the suspension was called. Australia has called for a G6 Ministerial Meeting on the sidelines of the Cairns Group 20th Anniversary Ministerial Meeting, set for September 20-22 in Cairns, Australia. Clearly some members are determined to keep going in the same direction without reflecting and Pascal Lamy believes that members simply need to move a little from their entrenched positions.

Yet, the WTO talks failed because the members are not working with a framework that is able to address some of the most fundamental issues that all countries struggle with, including the need to generate sufficient, stable, well-paying jobs; to ensure access for all to adequate and affordable food; and to diversify sources of foreign exchange to avoid shocks to government finances. Without the right mix of policies, liberalizing trade exacerbates these problems rather than contributing to their solution.

The major beneficiaries of the model of trade promoted in the WTO are transnational corporations (TNCs), many of which are headquartered in developed countries, and which control a huge share of global production and exports. Their over-riding interest is in ready access to the lowest cost raw materials and labour and in as few barriers to trade as possible. On the other side, especially in developed countries, there are some well organized sectors fighting to protect the status quo-the cotton industry in the U.S., the sugar industry in the U.S. and EU, and the shipping companies from the U.S. that benefit from food aid deliveries, for instance. Some of these groups resist change because they are profiting handsomely from the existing programs. Many of the farmers opposed to change have already seen their income fall precipitously over the past ten years and do not want to jeopardize such protection as they now have until they know what will take its place.

The vast majority of people affected by trade, including millions of small-scale farmers and workers in the developing world, are severely marginalized by the trade agenda and are the most negatively affected by the existing system. If any of the small farmers’ production is sold abroad, it is for the most part exported by firms in which the farmers have no stake, so they do not necessarily benefit from the expanded markets. At the same time, their local markets are filling with imports, often at dumped prices. The imports depress demand for their production in the markets where they have the most control over profit margins.

Simply calling for the Doha negotiations to restart immediately, as many WTO members are, particularly developing country members, will not guarantee the changes needed to address these concerns. In fact, recent projections and research by the World Bank, the UN and a variety of independent think tanks consistently confirm that the poorest countries would be the biggest losers if the current Doha framework were agreed to.

The model of trade promoted in the Doha negotiations would perpetuate a system that accumulates wealth in the hands of a few and further marginalizes the poor.

The suspension of trade talks is no reason for dismay. It is a reflection of changing relations among countries in trade negotiations. In the past five years, power relations in the WTO have gradually shifted and the interests of developing countries are better reflected in the negotiations. Now the challenge is to consolidate these gains, while tackling the model of trade itself. There remain long-standing and deep divisions in how countries view trade as a tool for development and economic growth. The current framework is inadequate to respond to these different interests. It is now time to build a new framework that can better respond to each country’s right to set their own development and employment objectives according to the needs of their people, while at the same time ensuring that they do not harm other countries’ ability to do the same.

Understanding the Collapse: hope for the future

The immediate cause for the collapse of trade talks was attributed to a lack of agreement over how much to reduce agricultural subsidies in the U.S., agricultural tariffs in the European Union and industrial tariffs in the largest developing countries. Neither U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), Susan Schwab, nor E.C. Trade Commissioner, Peter Mandelson, had sufficient political support back home to offer what was needed to get agreement from the rest of the WTO membership. U.S. Congressional leaders, in particular, voiced strong opposition to the offers of other WTO members in Geneva and they made repeated public statements about their refusal to support any compromise. A number of the large farm and commodity groups in the U.S., groups that supported the USTR during the Uruguay Round, oppose the Doha negotiations. These groups are not convinced that the opportunity for expanding markets abroad is great enough to justify the cuts to domestic support that are being asked of them.

The division of executive and legislative power in the U.S. means the USTR has to be sure Congress will support its offers at the WTO. In most countries, the executive and legislative branches of government have one head, a Prime Minister, who controls parliament and who’s representative (a Trade Minister) negotiates on behalf of the government. President Bush does not control Congress in this sense, not even when his party holds a majority of the seats. U.S. trade negotiators in Geneva therefore cannot assume they have Congressional support, but must work closely with the Congressional leadership to ensure the leadership is supportive of what USTR is doing. The U.S. system has important strengths. It allows more direct participation of different stakeholders in trade negotiations. It also provides important checks and balances on trade negotiators to ensure that they are not negotiating against the national interest. On the other hand, it complicates international negotiations because U.S. domestic politics have a disproportionate influence on the outcome of negotiations and the voices of U.S. interests are heard more loudly than those of other countries.

In fact, many of the other WTO members lack domestic political support to conclude the Doha Agenda in its current form. This resistance is heard in different ways. Millions of small-scale farmers in India have held demonstrations recently and their representatives have voiced strong opposition to the current negotiations. This has resonance in Geneva. Indian Commerce Minister, Kamal Nath, has repeatedly made it clear that he will not sacrifice the livelihoods of millions of small-scale farmers for the sake of an agreement.

South African Trade Minister, Mr Mandisi Mpahlwa, is facing serious political resistance from the union movement, particularly from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). COSATU opposes the direction of the non-agricultural market access (NAMA) negotiations. COSATU says the proposals threaten thousands of jobs and would ruin the possibility to further develop an industrial base in South Africa. This has led to South Africa taking on the leadership of the NAMA 11-a group of developing countries fighting to reclaim space for development needs in the NAMA negotiations.

Trade Ministers from Indonesia and the Philippines, Mari Pangestu and Peter B. Favila respectively, have strongly defended the food and livelihood security concerns of their small-scale farmers, reflecting well-organized political demands at home. They have successfully resisted the aggressive push by the U.S. to limit the flexibilities available to developing countries in the form of Special Products and a Special Safeguard Mechanism for agriculture.

While the interests of organized lobbies from the U.S. and the E.C. are still predominant, it is clear that voices from developing countries are increasingly reflected in the negotiations. This is cause for hope. It is no longer possible, as was the case in the Uruguay Round, for a handful of developed countries to set the outline of a deal among themselves and then impose that on the rest of the membership. Continuing to strengthen the voices of people at the national level in trade debates so as to be able to influence their governments’ trade positions is an essential step towards making the multilateral trading system more accountable.

The Take-Over of Bilateral & Regional Trade Agreements: Myth or Reality?

Whenever negotiations in the WTO are stalled, anxiety among WTO members rises that a failure of the multilateral system will trigger a wave of bilateral and regional trade agreements (BTAs and RTAs). As a result, many WTO members are eager to resume negotiations as quickly as possible, whether the problems underlying the stalled negotiations are properly addressed or not, so as not to lose momentum at the multilateral level. Pascal Lamy’s letter to trade ministers published in the International Herald Tribune on 27th July was no exception: "There are clear signs", he said, "that the failure this week has already given rise to two phenomena that threaten the multilateral system: a shift in priorities to bilateral or regional agreements (...), and a surge in threats to achieve through our highly effective dispute settlement system what could not be achieved through the negotiations."

Many developing country WTO members prefer multilateral trade negotiations because it provides a more balanced environment for developing countries to defend their interests. BTAs and RTAs tend to extract greater commitments to lower or remove trade barriers than the WTO (sometimes known as WTO-plus commitments) with less special and differential treatment to take account of development needs. BTAs and RTAs also tend to overlap, which creates a confusion of rules that complicate (and add expense to) traders’ business. Many countries, reflecting the interests of their traders, prefer a harmonized global trade system, with as few rules as possible.

But will an immediate restart of the Doha negotiations lessen the threat of a renewed focus on bilateral and regional trade negotiations?

According to the FAO’s 2004 State of Agricultural Commodity Markets Report: "The number of regional trade agreements (RTAs) has grown at a rate of 15 per year since 1995, more than five times the rate during the previous 45 years." The number of BTA and RTA negotiations has been at its highest since the WTO was established. Far from being alternatives to one another, the different trade negotiating forums are on parallel tracks, progressing in tandem. Even though a deadlock in at the multilateral level might increase the energy spent at a bilateral and regional level, they are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they are pursued simultaneously, as part of the same ideological push for deregulated world markets.

Regional trade arrangements can actually provide an opportunity for developing countries to expand their markets in the region and provide new opportunities for their producers. As FAO puts it, "in many developing regions, RTAs are seen as a vehicle for promoting and diversifying trade." Some problems do arise, however, when countries within a region are at very different levels of development. "NAFTA’s impact on Mexican agriculture provides a stark reminder that RTAs can produce losers as well as winners, particularly when they include countries at different levels of economic development." (FAO, State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2004).

Countries in South America have demonstrated that it is possible to resist the demands of developed country counterparts in BTAs and RTAs. The Bolivian government, for example, recently issued a paper outlining conditions it will impose on any further engagement in trade negotiations. The Free Trade Area of the Americas’ talks stalled because the U.S. could not persuade Latin America to meet its terms. This resistance is a reflection of the strong campaigns by Latin American social movements and civil society organizations, which have had a significant influence on their governments.

Unfortunately, poorer countries like those in sub-Saharan Africa that are currently negotiating Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the European Union, face a much harder challenge. Many of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries have old colonial ties to the EU that are reflected in current trade patterns. These countries are also often heavily dependent on preferences first granted by the EU under the Lomé Conventions (now the Cotonou Agreements). Civil society organizations both in the EU and in the ACP countries have a lot of work ahead to prevent the EC, on the one hand, striking a damaging deal for people in ACP countries, and, on the other, to pressure the ACP governments not to sign a trade agreement that does not serve development interests.

Yet the EPA negotiations will continue with or without negotiations on the Doha Agenda. The question to be posed for all trade agreements is less whether multilateral trade agreements are better than bilateral or regional trade agreements, or whether deadlock in one forum triggers movement in another. The central question is more whether the model of trade and the types of power relations that govern these different negotiations allow countries to fulfill their development and employment objectives. Unless countries start to tackle these fundamental questions they will continue to face opposition to all types of trade negotiations.

A Time for Reflection

The collapse of talks is an opportunity to set a new course. It is a chance for rich countries to rebuild trust with poorer countries. It is a chance for the WTO to rethink its role in the multilateral system. Governments need to make the WTO work cooperatively with UN institutions, looking to integrate trade into long-standing obligations to respect and promote human rights, to protect and rehabilitate our polluted planet and natural resource base, and to end the scourge of poverty.

For trade rules to have any chance of tackling these more fundamental issues, the mindset of governments, and particularly trade ministries, needs to change. Trade does not operate in a vacuum. Trade ministries need to be able to locate trade in a broader context. Trade ministries need to communicate and collaborate more with other ministries that are affected by trade rules, to ensure that proposals on trade policy do not undermine efforts to increase employment, build up industries and agriculture production, protect the environment, and improve access to health care. In addition, all ministries must be more aware of how trade policies affect them and engage more with the trade ministries in the formulation of trade policies at the national level. Without this change, trade negotiations will continue along the same trajectory, simultaneously at all levels-unilateral, bilateral, regional and multilateral.

It is time to think outside the box. WTO members have been given a unique opportunity to fundamentally change the course of the trading system. It is time for WTO members to confront the challenges and work towards a different model of trade that supports genuine development and employment objectives.

The WTO Goes On

Even though the Doha negotiations have been suspended, the WTO will continue to function. The WTO houses regular committees that monitor the implementation of the existing agreements. These will continue as normal. The WTO’s Dispute Settlement System will also continue to operate and is actually expected to increase its workload if WTO members decide to use legal measures to challenge the trade policy measures of other members. Oxfam has already released a report indicating that developing countries such as Chile, Costa Rica, Argentina, Kenya, Peru, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Egypt, Thailand and Nigeria, could bring cases against the EU and US on rice, corn, sorghum, milk, butter, tobacco, fruit and tomato subsidies.

Governments are also expected to continue negotiations in two other areas, both technical assistance measures for developing countries: "Development-Assistance Aspects of Cotton" and "Aid for Trade." The Aid for Trade taskforce submitted recommendations to the General Council, which were adopted (see www.wto.org WT/AFT/1). The taskforce members and other donors called for members to approve continuation of the work of the taskforce.

In recent years, the US, Europe and other industrialised powers have been stepping up their efforts to sign bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) and bilateral investment treaties (BITs). This increased attention to bilateral deals goes hand in hand with the deadlock in global trade talks at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). FTAs commit countries not only to accelerated liberalisation of trade in goods, such as agricultural products, but bring in new rules for trade in services, intellectual property rights, investment, etc. Negotiated outside the multilateral system, even further away from public scrutiny, they provide even greater freedom for the world’s most powerful governments to push developing countries, and smaller industrialised countries, to adopt policies that are much worse than what is agreed to at the WTO.

Despite their name, these agreements are about much more than trade. They provide transnational corporations (TNCs) with vast, new, legally enforceable rights in foreign markets. Countries are being hand-picked for bilateral agreements on the basis of geopolitical concerns. Much of the FTA "chess game" today is a competition between large powers trying to secure spheres of political and economic influence. Competition between the US and the EU is a key part of that dynamic. But China, India, Japan, Brazil and others are also vying for a place in the emerging new landscape.

People’s movements have been fighting FTAs ever since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed between Mexico, the US and Canada in 1993. Over the years, that fight has multiplied and grown - from Morocco to Korea and from Ecuador to Thailand. To our knowledge, so far only one FTA negotiation process has been stopped as a result of social mobilisation and pressure. In other instances, particularly in Korea, social movements have caused significant disruptions and delays of their government’s FTAs. Still, many grassroots struggles against FTAs and BITs have remained cut off from each other, a direct result of the "divide and rule" logic of bilateralism. FTA Watch, a loose coalition at the forefront of the struggle in Thailand, felt a strong desire to break this logic and share experiences with anti-FTA movements in other countries. It called on bilaterals.org, GRAIN and MSF - all of whom had been involved in global work against FTAs and BITs for many years - to help them organise an international strategy meeting, which was held in Bangkok on 27-29 July 2006.

This workshop brought together, for the first time, movements from many different countries which have been fighting FTAs and BITs. Participation hinged on people who have been directly involved in grassroots struggles to derail these agreements. Nearly 60 participants came from 19 countries across every time zone. Rather than attempting to set up a new network or build a common agenda, the workshop’s objectives were to share people’s experiences fighting FTAs in different countries and to build strategy ideas to strengthen national, regional and international struggles against FTAs.

North-South FTAs are neo-colonial. They turn developing countries into a pool of natural resources or cheap labour for the benefit of TNCs. Many industrialised countries are pursuing deals similar to the US model, even if the language differs. With the promise of greater access to US markets, and the blockage at the WTO, governments of many developing countries are eager to go into such agreements. The surge in South-South FTAs is often limited to specific sectors but, like the North-South deals, also revolves around an intense jockeying for power. Emerging giants such as China and India are pursuing FTAs as a way to gain influence in Asia and beyond. In Latin America, FTAs are both a theatre and a tool of power struggles in the region, especially between Mercosur, the Andean Community and the new alliance between Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba.

Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture – (I)

The 4th annual Nelson Mandela Lecture was delivered by President Thabo Mbeki at the University of Witwatersrand on 29 July, 2006. The guest list included Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, Dr. Graca Machel, and the Deputy President of South Africa, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. This issue of the South Bulletin carries the first part of this lecture, with the remainder being carried in the next issue.

"I believe I know this as a matter of fact, that the great masses of our country everyday pray that the new South Africa that is being born will be a good, a moral, a humane and a caring South Africa, which, as it matures, will progressively guarantee the happiness of all its citizens.

I say this as I begin this Lecture to warn you about my intentions, which are about trying to convince you that because of the infancy of our brand new society, we have the possibility to act in ways that would, for the foreseeable future, infuse the values of Ubuntu into our very being as a people.

But what is it that constitutes Ubuntu - beyond the standard and yet correct rendition - Motho ke motho ka motho yo mongoe: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu!

The Book of Proverbs in the Holy Bible contains some injunctions that capture a number of elements of what I believe constitute important features of the Spirit of Ubuntu, which we should strive to implant in the very bosom of the new South Africa that is being born - the food of the soul that would inspire all our people to say that they are proud to be South African!

The Proverbs say:

The Book of Proverbs assumes that as human beings, we have the human capacity to do as it says - not to withhold the good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of (our) hand to do it, and not to say NO to our neighbour, come again, and we will give you something tomorrow, even when we can give the necessary help today.

It assumes that we can be encouraged not to devise evil against our neighbours, with whom we otherwise live in harmony.

It assumes that we are capable of responding to the injunction that we should not declare war against anybody without cause, especially those who have not caused us any harm.

It urges that in our actions, we should not seek to emulate the demeanour of our oppressors, nor adopt their evil practices.

I am conscious of the fact that to the cynics, all this sounds truly like the behaviour we would expect and demand of angels. I am also certain that all of us are convinced that, most unfortunately, we would find it difficult to find such angels in our country, who would number more than the fingers on two hands!

It may indeed very well be that, as against coming across those we can honestly describe as good people, we would find it easier to identify not only evil-doers, but also those who intentionally set out to do evil. In this regard, we would not be an exception in terms both of time and space.

To illustrate what I am trying to say, I will take the liberty to quote words from the world of drama. I know of none of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, except Richard III, that begins with an open declaration of villainy by the very villain of the play.

This well-known play begins with an oration by the Duke of Gloucester, who later becomes King Richard III, in which he unashamedly declares his evil intentions, in these famous words:

This open proclamation of evil intent stands in direct opposition to the directive in the Proverbs, which said, "Devise not evil against thy neighbour, seeing he dwelleth securely by thee. Strive not with a man without cause, if he have done thee no harm."

Surely, all this tells us the naked truth that the intention to do good, however noble in its purposes, does not guarantee that such good will be done.

Nevertheless we must ask ourselves the question whether this reality of the presence of many Richards III in our midst, dictates that we should, accordingly, avoid setting ourselves the goal to do good!

Many years ago now, Nelson Mandela made bold to say that our country needs an "RDP of the soul", the Reconstruction and Development of its soul.

He made this call as our country, in the aftermath of our liberation in 1994, was immersed in an effort to understand the elements of the Reconstruction and Development Programme that had constituted the core of the Election Manifesto of the ANC in our first democratic elections.

That RDP was eminently about changing the material conditions of the lives of our people. It made no reference to matters of the soul, except indirectly. For instance, the RDP document said:

"The RDP integrates (economic) growth, development, reconstruction and redistribution into a unified programme. The key to this link is an infrastructural programme that will provide access to modern and effective services like electricity, water, telecommunications, transport, health, education and training for all our people…This will lead to an increased output in all sectors of the economy, and by modernising our infrastructure and human resource development, we will also enhance export capacity. Success in linking reconstruction and development is essential if we are to achieve peace and security for all."

All of these were, and remain critically important and eminently correct objectives that we must continue to pursue. Indeed, in every election since 1994, our contending political parties have vied for the favours of our people on the basis of statistics that are about all these things.

All revolutions, which, by definition, seek to replace one social order with another, are, in the end, and in essence, concerned with human beings and the improvement of the human condition. This is also true of our Democratic Revolution of 1994.

Assuming this assertion to be true, we must also say that human fulfilment consists of more than "access to modern and effective services like electricity, water, telecommunications, transport, health, education and training for all our people", to use the words in the RDP document.

As distinct from other species of the animal world, human beings also have spiritual needs. It might perhaps be more accurate and less arrogant to say that these needs are more elevated and have a more defining impact on human beings than they do on other citizens of the animal world.

Thus do all of us, and not merely the religious leaders, speak of the intangible element that is immanent in all human beings - the soul!

Acceptance of this proposition as a fact must necessarily mean that we have to accept the related assertion that, consequently, all human societies also have a soul!

To deny this would demand that we argue in a convincing manner, and therefore with all due logical coherence, that the fact that individual human beings might have a soul does not necessarily mean that the human societies they combine to constitute will themselves, in consequence, also have a soul!

I dare say that this would prove to be an impossible task. Nevertheless, we must accept that, as in the contrast provided by the Proverbs and Richard III, and with regard to the construction of a humane and caring society, we must accept that this entails a struggle, rather than any self-evident and inevitable victory of good over evil.

The question must therefore arise - for those among us who believe that we represent the good, what must we do to succeed in our purposes!

Since no human action takes place outside of established objective reality, and since we want to achieve our objectives, necessarily we must strive to understand the social conditions that would help to determine whether we succeed or fail.

What I have said relates directly to what needed and needs to be done to achieve the objective that Nelson Mandela set the nation, to accomplish the RDP of its soul.

In this regard, I will take the liberty to quote what I said in 1978 in a Lecture delivered in Canada, reflecting on the formation of South African society, which was later reproduced in the ANC journal, "Sechaba", under the title "The Historical Injustice".

"The historic compromise of 1910 has therefore this significance that in granting the vanquished Boer equal political and social status with the British victor, it imposed on both the duty to defend the status quo against especially those whom that status quo defined as the dominated. The capitalist class, to whom everything has a cash value, has never considered moral incentives as very dependable. As part of the arrangement, it therefore decided that material incentives must play a prominent part.

"It consequently bought out the whole white population. It offered a price to the white workers and the Afrikaner farmers in exchange for an undertaking that they would shed their blood in defence of capital. Both worker and farmer, like Faustus, took the devil’s offering and, like Faustus, they will have to pay on the appointed day.

"The workers took the offering in monthly cash grants and reserved jobs. The farmers took their share by having black labour, including and especially prison labour directed to the farms. They also took it in the form of huge subsidies and loans to help them maintain a ‘civilised standard of living’."

Of relevance to our purposes this evening, the critical point conveyed in these paragraphs is that, within the context of the development of capitalism in our country, individual acquisition of material wealth, produced through the oppression and exploitation of the black majority, became the defining social value in the organisation of white society.

Because the white minority was the dominant social force in our country, it entrenched in our society as a whole, including among the oppressed, the deep-seated understanding that personal wealth constituted the only true measure of individual and social success.

As we achieved our freedom in 1994, this had become the dominant social value, affecting the entirety of our population. Inevitably, as an established social norm, this manifested itself even in the democratic state machinery that had, seemingly "seamlessly", replaced the apartheid state machinery.

I am arguing that the new order, born of the victory in 1994, inherited a well-entrenched value system that placed individual acquisition of wealth at the very centre of the value system of our society as a whole.

In practice this meant that, provided this did not threaten overt social disorder, society assumed a tolerant or permissive attitude towards such crimes as theft and corruption, especially if these related to public property.

The phenomenon we are describing, which we considered as particularly South African, was in fact symptomatic of the capitalist system in all countries. It had been analysed by all serious commentators on the capitalist political-economy, including such early analysts as Adam Smith.

Specifically, in this regard, we are speaking of the observations made by the political-economists that, since the onset of capitalism in England, the values of the capitalist market, of individual profit maximisation, had tended to displace the values of human solidarity.

In despair at this development, R. H. Tawney wrote in his famous book, "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism":

"To argue, in the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business and another for private life, is to open the door to an orgy of unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils…(Yet) granted that I should love my neighbour as myself, the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale (economic) organisation, remain for solution are, Who precisely is my neighbour? And, How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice?

"To these questions the conventional religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even realised that they could be put…Religion had not yet learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral principles, by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transactions of economic life no moral principles exist."

In his well known book, "The Great Transformation", in a Chapter headed "Market and Man", Karl Polanyi went on to say:

"To separate labour from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organisation, an atomistic and individualist one.

"Such a scheme of destruction was best served by the application of the principle of freedom of contract. In practice this meant that the non-contractual organisations of kinship, neighbourhood, profession, and creed were to be liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the individual and thus restrained his freedom.

"To represent this principle as one of non-interference, as economic liberals were wont to do, was merely the expression of an ingrained prejudice in favour of a definite kind of interference, namely, such as would destroy non-contractual relations between individuals and prevent the spontaneous reformation."

In a Foreword to a recent edition of this book, Joseph Stiglitz says: "Polanyi stresses a particular defect in the self-regulating economy that only recently has been brought back into discussion. It involves the relationship between the economy and society, with how economic systems, or reforms, can affect how individuals relate to one another. Again, as the importance of social relations has increasingly become recognised, the vocabulary has changed. We now talk, for instance, about social capital."

With reference to this Lecture, the central point made by Polanyi is that the capitalist market destroys relations of "kinship, neighbourhood, profession, and creed", replacing these with the pursuit of personal wealth by citizens who, as he says, have become "atomistic and individualistic."

Thus, everyday, and during every hour of our time beyond sleep, the demons embedded in our society, that stalk us at every minute, seem always to beckon each one of us towards a realisable dream and nightmare. With every passing second, they advise, with rhythmic and hypnotic regularity - get rich! get rich! get rich!

And thus has it come about that many of us accept that our common natural instinct to escape from poverty is but the other side of the same coin on whose reverse side are written the words - at all costs, get rich!

In these circumstances, personal wealth, and the public communication of the message that we are people of wealth, becomes, at the same time, the means by which we communicate the message that we are worthy citizens of our community, the very exemplars of what defines the product of a liberated South Africa.

This peculiar striving produces the particular result that manifestations of wealth, defined in specific ways, determine the individuality of each one of us who seeks to achieve happiness and self-fulfilment, given the liberty that the revolution of 1994 brought to all of us.

G-33 Statement

The following is the statement issued by the Minister/High Level Meeting of the Group of 33 (G-33) developing country coalition after in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, on 10 September 2006.

The projects are clearly being driven by an outside agenda. At their core is a long-standing strategy pursued by the World Bank and the US government to harmonise regulations for GM crops across regions in order to override national processes that are more susceptible to local opposition. The idea is to establish favourable regulations in a few countries whose governments are open to GM crops and then to use these regulations as a model that can be imposed on neighbouring countries by way of regional policy bodies. In this way, harmonisation side-steps any possible democratic debate and provides corporations with a large, one-stop shop for their GM crops.

The project’s preliminary processes have already shown a complete disregard for genuine public debate. There is still no French version of the West African project proposal, even though all of the participating countries are Francophone. In Benin, NGOs participating in an initial project consultation organised by the US consulting firm Market Strategies were presented with the introduction of GM crops as a foregone conclusion. The NGOs were confined to a meeting separated from the previous day’s meeting with farmers’ organisations and government officials, which they were not allowed to attend. Likewise, in Costa Rica, the World Bank project builds on a GEF funded biosafety process that has already been denounced by the national network of civil society organisations active on biodiversity issues (Red de Coordinacion en Biodiversidad) for its lack of effective civil society participation and for bringing forward a biosafety bill that excluded the network from participation in the National Biosafety Commission, something which is guaranteed by presidential decree.

In contrast, the GM lobby has a direct hand in the World Bank projects, as partners, advisors and even funders. Participants in the projects include CropLife—the main lobby arm of the GM corporations—as well as GM industry front groups like the Public Research and Regulation Initiative and AfricaBio.

The project’s other core objective is to advance the GM industry’s on-going strategy of contamination. The projects will facilitate or initiate field trials and pave the way for the commercialisation of GM crops, with a focus on crops that are central to the peasant farming systems in the respective regions. The Latin American project specifically sets out to facilitate the "deployment" of GM crops in the centres of origin for these crops. Contamination will be inevitable, as the World Bank certainly understands. Indeed, the projects assume that the GM crops will be introduced on a large-scale in the regions. Biosafety "capacity-building" in this sense is merely about managing the ensuing contamination.

The West Africa Regional Biosafety Project is a direct descendent of the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) activities in the region and the UNEP-GEF project that came to an end last year. As national debate over GM crops has erupted in the region, leading to a wide variation in national biosafety process, USAID has been aggressively supporting regional biosafety harmonisation and the introduction of transgenic Bt cotton, the main cash crop for West African peasants.

The US government has a three-fold agenda in pushing Bt cotton in West Africa: bringing African support to the small club of GM nations on the international stage; distracting attention from unfair US domestic cotton subsidies; and, securing US corporate control over West Africa’s lucrative cotton production. The World Bank project plans to piggy-back on several US Bt cotton projects [1] and use field trials to develop a single uniform model for risk assessment and regulation that can be adopted throughout West Africa.

USAID is also busy supporting biosafety harmonisation initiatives in the region. The Sahel Institute is drafting a regional biosafety framework for Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal. The West and Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development developed a $25 million regional project on biotechnology and biosecurity with USAID support that was then approved at a Ministerial Meeting on Biotechnology of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Bamako in 2005. During the Bamako meeting, which was also funded by USAID, the ECOWAS Ministers pledged to harmonise their biosafety regulations within 5 years.

The World Bank project is the next step forward in this harmonisation process. ECOWAS covers a large market, covering all 15 countries of West Africa, but, according to the World Bank, it doesn’t have the authority to force member countries to adopt common legislation; it can only make policy recommendations. The World Bank project, therefore, focuses instead on WAEMU - a smaller grouping of 8 West African states that has the power to impose the "fast-track adoption" of compulsory "enabling" legislation on its members. As stated in the project proposal: "If WAEMU is able to harmonise national biosafety legislations and later to enforce a decision taken in one country in the other countries, it will drastically improve the investment climate in biotechnology for cash and food crops in the WAEMU area...by diminishing the costs of doing business." Once adopted within WAEMU, the Bank says it will then look to "scale-up" the project to the much bigger market of ECOWAS.

Harmonisation is part of the agenda for the Latin America project as well. The countries in that region were in part selected because of the "political, strategic, future role they might play in biosafety management in their respective regions". Such "harmonisation" is inherently unscientific and contrary to sound biosafety practice. It does not respect even the minimum standards laid out in the Biosafety Protocol because the projects will usurp sovereign rights of countries to take biosafety decisions, on a country-by-country, case-by-case basis. The Protocol envisions that biosafety decision-making take place at the national level, in the context of open and transparent public awareness and participation (Article 23), respecting the rights of local and indigenous peoples (Article 26), and conserving centres of origin and genetic diversity. To be scientifically rigorous and sensitive to local realities, assessments must be based on a country’s specific ecological socio-economic context and they must be informed by genuine public debate. The research required to support effective environmental risk assessments is extensive and long-term, and all countries must have enough policy space to set their own priorities and not be pressured, from a lack of resources and capacity, to adopt those that are reactionary or merely responsive to industry developments.

The main reason for selecting the five countries involved in the Latin American project is that as a group they are among the most important centres of biodiversity in the world and centres of origin for four of the five crops targeted by the project. This central objective is explicit in the name of the project: "Biosafety in Centers of Biodiversity: Building Technical Capacity in Latin America for Safe Deployment of Transgenic Crops".

There are five crops that the project focuses on: cassava, cotton, maize, potato and rice. Millions of people in Latin America depend on these crops for food, medicine, livelihoods and cultural identity. The rich diversity within these crops that exists in the region is directly attributed to indigenous and peasant farmers’ communities, who have conserved, recreated and utilised the crops and maintained deep cultural and spiritual relationships to them. Maize, potatoes, cotton and cassava make up the most important crops for Mesoamerican, Andean and Amazonian communities. Rice is also an extremely important crop in the region since it makes up an essential part of the basic diet of local communities.

It is impossible to accept the project’s purported concern in strengthening the capacity of participating countries to implement the Biosafety Protocol, an agreement dealing with transboundary trade in GMOs, when it focuses mainly on local food crops that are rarely traded across borders in the region. Rather, the real aim here is to push GM crops into the very heart of the region’s peasant agriculture and food sovereignty. The project’s introduction of GM varieties of these crops will inevitably contaminate traditional varieties and thus pave the way for the destruction of the seed and food systems that indigenous and peasant communities have developed over millennia.

The fierce resistance to GM crops among indigenous and peasant communities in Latin America is rooted in their determination to defend their seed systems from such GM contamination. The World Bank’s project is a direct effort to undermine this opposition by putting scientific agencies that have already demonstrated their support for GM agriculture, such as CIAT, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology Research (Costa Rica) and EMBRAPA (Brazil), in charge of developing field test protocols and regulations that can give the veneer of legitimacy to the deliberate GM contamination of farmer seed systems. The national scientific centres participating in the project are even referred to as "ports of entry".

It’s not a big surprise to see governments in Latin America and Africa signing up for these World Bank projects. Few governments are willing to uphold the opposition to GM crops that is expressed by their people, especially when money is on the table and powerful actors like the World Bank and USAID are involved.

These regional projects shift decision-making power even further to international and regional bodies that are removed from local influence and they give undue power to agencies like the World Bank, that are well-known for championing the interests of GM corporations. Such projects make a mockery of the vibrant national and local debates on GM raging around the world.

With another 10 regional biosafety projects supposedly in the GEF pipeline, the gulf between the official decision-makers and the people they supposedly represent could grow even deeper. Once again, real biosafety will have to be secured at the grassroots, in local struggles to keep GM crops out.

Notes

[1] Current US programs to introduce Bt cotton in the region include a $7 million "West African Cotton Improvement Programme" that promises to "improve the enabling environment for agricultural biotechnology", a USAID-financed project for field trials of Bt cotton in Mali, and USAID’s Bioengineerd Cotton in Africa project.

South Centre News

Executive Director

The Executive Director of the South Centre, Prof. Yash Tandon, is attending the 14th Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) being held in Havana, Cuba, from 11 to 16 September. The South Centre has an Observer status at the NAM. Earlier, Prof. Tandon met with the senior officials of the Commonwealth secretariat and with other organizations in London (6-7 September, 2006) to explore project funding possibilities.

Global Governance for Development

The staff of this programme:

Innovation, Access to Knowledge and Intellectual Property

The Programme staff:

Trade for Development

The programme staff:

Editorial

WTO: Pressure Building Up to Resume Doha Talks

On the face of it, the Doha round of international trade talks stand suspended. But in reality, the senior officials and Ministers in charge of commerce appear to be busy in talks aimed at resuming the stalled negotiations. Over the week-end of 9-10 September, a number of Ministers and senior officials from the South met Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Among those present were their counterparts from the United States, Europe and Japan. It is also clear that the deadlock is not easy to break. Because that means coming up with new positions that can converge. That convergence is dictated by the mandate of the Doha Agenda, subsequently amplified in the July Framework and the Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration. That, says the joint statement of the Group of 20 and all other developing country coalitions, is ‘the only acceptable outcome’ and one that fully delivers on the Doha commitments. The pledge made at Doha was to place the interests and needs of developing countries, especially the least-developed among them, at the heart of the Round. Development and agriculture are to be at the heart of the multilateral trading system and not on its periphery.

There cannot be a dispute over the fact that agriculture lies at the centre of the Doha Development Agenda. Most of the world’s poor make their living out of agriculture. Their livelihood and standards of living are seriously jeopardized by the subsidies and market access barriers prevailing in international agricultural trade. Any Round that would be faithful to its development dimension must urgently redress this situation. The WTO negotiations in agriculture have to live up to the commitments of the Doha Mandate. This would entail results that guarantee substantial and effective reduction in trade-distorting domestic support coupled with necessary disciplines to prevent box-shifting and product-shifting of support; substantial improvement in market access; and expeditious elimination of all forms of export subsidies. A forward movement in agriculture holds the key to a successful Doha round. Success now can open more ambitious rounds in the future for the trade majors.

For their part, the developing countries have reiterated their determination to achieve a balanced and proportionate outcome with a comparable high level of ambition both in agriculture and in NAMA, as agreed under Paragraph 24 of the Hong-Kong Ministerial Declaration. As of now, the ball is clearly in the court of the rich industrialized nations to make the right moves. Developed members, in particular the major trading countries, do bear a special and specific responsibility for the outcome of the Round. They must show their readiness to implement measures that remove trade distortions and significantly open their markets. Their current positions do not provide an adequate basis for leading the negotiations to a successful conclusion. Clearly, they need to significantly improve their proposals especially in the two crucial areas of domestic support and agriculture market access, as well as be prepared to deliver on the development dimension of the DDA.

The current situation threatens not only the Doha round. The multilateral trading system itself now faces a serious crisis. Brazil’s Minister Celso Amorim noted, ‘it is s not just trade that is at stake, but the whole world order.’ To the extent that this Development round was meant to correct the imbalances of the past written into the international trading system, a failure to do so means perpetuating the trading inequities between the rich industrialized countries and the developing world which is ready to throw down its shackles of under-development. Indeed, there are bigger questions of ‘freedom, democracy and human rights’ embedded into the success of this present round. The rich nations must allow trade to prove its development potential. In shaping the contours of a new world order, both the North and the South have a major role to play.

Thursday, September 14, 2006