WTO Dispatches from Hong Kong

“We have no more desire to preside over the inequities of world trade,”

India’s Trade Minister Kamal Nath

Understanding what is happening with regard to world trade it is often hard to follow if one does not give it full time – which few of us are able to do. There are two reasons for this difficulty. First, the important points are often found in technicalities and details that are hard to find and understand. This problem is complicated by the fact that the facts are often hidden beneath a rhetoric that is deliberately misleading. However, three broad and very important facts stand out clearly in the articles below:

1.The struggle that counts in the world is not between those who are for globalization and those who are against it; rather it has to do with what kind of globalization we will have.

2.Whether we will attain the kind of globalization that is in the interest of the 80% of the world’s population that are economically disadvantaged depends on the ability of this 80% to see that only by facing the current economic elite from a position of solidarity can their needs be met; above all this means resisting the divide and conquer tactics of the United States and the other neo-liberal rulers of the world.

3.This lesson has been learned; its a new day.

You can't turn back the dawn.

POH staff

By Joshua Holland December 13, 2005,

AlterNet

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: the anti-globalization activists who have traveled to Hong Kong are fiercely pro-globalization. They’re building transnational social movements, they’re linking workers and farmers and unionists and NGOs across borders and they’re doing it North-South, North-North and South-South. They’re black and white and brown and they use all the technologies that make up the wonder of globalization.

Inside the Convention Center in business suits and power skirts are the real anti-globalization activists. They have little interest in globalizing rule sets for human rights, they don’t want transnational environmental frameworks, they don’t want to see labor reaching out across borders and the pro-globalization anti-globalization activists scare the crap out of them.

Their media have created the wild-eyed anti-globalization activist – the bogeyman lurking under the beds of good capitalists everywhere - to draw attention from the fact that the global justice movement is gaining strength and sophistication, and all on a shoe-string budget.

Let me paint you a picture of Victoria Park, where people have gathered from all over the planet -disproportionately from the developing world (I use that phrase but I hate it). The big secret is that the anti-corporatization movement is a series of teach-ins. People gather to share their experiences, discuss the tactics that have worked and those that have failed and, most of all, to learn.

For every mahogany-paneled room with little WTO pads and pencils in front of each seat in the Convention Center, there’s a tent in Victoria Park with some cheap rented chairs and a piece of plywood on crates. For every information session in the Convention Center where the Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers presents their hired gun academics’ data, there’s an NGO or post-doc presenting theirs.

But in Victoria park there’s something you won’t find in the shiny Convention Center: humanity. There’s food - no charge. Some Indonesian or Argentinean decided to make enough for everyone. People share water. People laugh and share their war stories.

I don’t have a doubt in my mind that there are a lot more loving relationships - and, for that matter, tawdry, sweaty hook-ups - formed in Victoria Park than in the Convention Center. It’s a breath of fresh air outside.

The people inside have an enormous amount of resources. They have the power of the state, the riot cops and the money to give everyone a welcome bag - I’ll open mine one of these days. They have the media.

But those gathered in Victoria Park have the sympathies of the guy selling falafel and the cab drivers. What’s more, they can walk between these colliding worlds - they have the ability to work in both places. Sometimes you see guys in suits and gals in power skirts in Victoria Park. But they’re not trade reps or advisors, they’re from the NGO community and they left the Convention Center for a while to educate the folks on those rickety chairs about what’s really going on in the mahogany-paneled conference rooms. And, no doubt, they’re happy for a breath of fresh air and a bit of humanity.

By Joshua Holland December 16, 2005,

I reported earlier about the buzz around the formation of a G-110 bloc of countries. That was tentative, it’s now official. The group has consulted and “harmonized their positions.” And it’s huge.

Ministers from the new group held an unusually energetic press conference where they vowed to stick together on the demands of countries representing over 80 percent of humanity. Adriano Campolina of the NGO Action Aid said, “this changes the entire politics of the global economy. No more will the wealthy states be able to use their strategy of divide and rule.”

India’s Trade Minister Kamal Nath, a prominent member of the G-20, said that the ministers were tired of the status quo. “We have no more desire to preside over the inequities of world trade,” he said. He added that the group would no longer accept the big three’s demand that “we pay them to do what they’re already supposed to do” – a reference to developed countries’ demands for access to WTO members’ service markets in exchange for agricultural reforms promised in the Uruguay Round completed in 1994. Nath called the formation “historic” and said “the economic architecture of the world is changing and the developed countries must recognize this.”

Dipak Patel, Zambia’s charismatic trade minister and leader of the group of Least Developed Countries said, “We’re not looking for elegant uses of the English language. We’re looking for what and when” – referring to the tariff- and duty-free access that the LDCs have long demanded. He got an applause line from the normally staid hall of journalists when he added: “And if you can’t tell us what and when, then you need to answer: what part of ‘no’ don’t you understand.”

This was in effect a coup: the developing countries of the world just hi-jacked the Doha “development round” and made its central focus the development that was promised in Doha. If they are successful, we’ll have to stop putting “development” in quotes.

The reactions of the U.S. and EU remain to be seen. It is entirely possible that this moment might mark the effective end of the WTO system. Will the U.S. and EU accept their status as equal partners? Or will they abandon the WTO system as a mechanism for moving forward and instead concentrate on bilateral and regional deals? And if they do, will the developing countries accept negotiations on those terms, or will they insist on negotiating within the WTO, a framework where they now have some clout?

Whatever develops, this was a sea-change.

Not all of Joshua Hollands reports are given here. Go directly to AlterNet for more information.