Other trade treaties growing unchecked and unseen.
by Amy Alexandra Wood
After eleven years of negotiations, the Doha Round of World Trade Organization (WTO) expansion is at a crossroads, raising important questions about the institution’s legitimacy and relevance. This fact became evident at the annual WTO Public Forum two weeks ago.
Around five hundred civil society groups including Via Campesina, PublicCitizen and EBAY, convened under the banner of multilateralism in Geneva — a far cry from the generous 1500 NGOs the WTO website touts. I arrived in Geneva with eager intentions of collecting research on the role of NGOs in trade, and a relatively open mind. Little did I realize how open it would have to be to understand the direction that global trade appears to be headed.
Since 1995, the WTO has been “opening trade for the benefit of all ” by hosting negotiations to spur global implementation of free trade. The current round, the Doha Development Agenda, was launched in 2001 (two years after the Battle in Seattle) to lower trade barriers while bringing developing countries into the fold.
Vehement public and NGO resistance to secretive treaties has had an effect on the WTO, (eg, the annual WTO Public Forum) but hasn’t necessarily deterred other rights-grabbing treaties. The implications are serious.
For the first time the WTO Secretariat acknowledged that the Doha Agenda is dead. With it goes all hopes of a single WTO undertaking on agriculture that would have required a commitment to sustainable development from countries that are heavily propped up by agricultural subsidies. (Canada dodged that bullet.) Given the lack of political will and the increasing number of issue areas vying for attention, nothing will be done in terms of agriculture any time soon.
The death of the Doha Agenda means the end of a single worldwide undertaking on agriculture, including linking subsidies to sustainability.
I was encouraged to see that the majority of delegates to the Canadian Mission were farmers, or at least representatives of agri-business. Yet, there was little clarity about why they were there and the few that I talked to didn’t seem to know.
My breakfast meeting with the Minister and Deputy Permanent Representative of Canada to the WTO Mission was rather bleak. Bruce Christie suggested that little movement in multilateral trade negotiations will occur before the Bali Ministerial in December 2013.
So what do we do until then? And what’s the alternative? More side treaties are popping up, and they can be very secretive. We’re hearing about more preferential trade agreements (PTAs) that circumvent the traditional fora of the WTO. PTAs may become the future of trade unless the major players come down to the bargaining table (the prospects for which are highly unlikely).
Two PTAs loom large for Canadians: CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (largely shrouded from the public eye), and the lesser-known Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA).
CETA promises to increase market access for the Canadian financial services sector — at great cost to municipal governments and the current trade deficit with Europe. Canadians have little to gain and a lot to lose from the agreement. For example, companies could sue governments for environmental or health laws that cut into their profits. The treaty also protects investors in way that could cost the government tens of millions in fines and will transfer ever more power to corporate interests with fewer rules about transparency and accountability.
Canadians have little to gain and a lot to lose from the agreement, especially environmental or health laws.
Prime Minister Harper is adamant about pushing CETA through by December — which is ironic, given that we are now challenging the European Union’s ban on seal products, which will probably cost more than the annual value of the seal hunt, and will likely not make the EU any happier with us.
In a post-2008 financial crash world, selling further financial de-regulation hasn’t been easy, despite repeated attempts. This time around, the trade vocabulary features nonsensical words such as “insourcing”, and “reindustrialization,” splashed across policy papers to suggest a new dimension of trade that will benefit everyone, everywhere all of the time. Sounds too good to be true? That’s because it is.
The theory is that trade can lessen the effects of the economic crisis by generating growth, which, in turn, leads to job creation. The devil is in the details: How do you integrate domestic and labour policies with trade policy so that more trade effectively leads to more jobs? Governments do have a duty to design domestic measures for job creation and income distribution, as well as facilitating trade, especially given our (Canada’s) surging unemployment rates.
One of the new buzzphrases is “the global value chain (GVC)”, which involves close calculation of “value added” at each stage as the product moves towards the retail customer. Focusing on such minutia, however, may not have the intended benefit of helping small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) get a foothold on the ladder of export trade. Value added on paper doesn’t pay the rent.
With their limited resources, and the operational requirements necessary to take advantage of the ‘added value’ could leave SMEs lagging, uncompetitive and more vulnerable to stormy markets. GVC’s real beneficiaries are big industry — multilateral corporations that are already deeply embedded into the supply chain and have the necessary transnational mobility and capital flows.
In sum, the death of the Doha Round should leave Canadians deeply troubled, or at least very confused. If you can sort through the rhetoric and muddled statistics you are left with more questions than answers, halves that do not add up to a whole, and a whole lot of drivel.
Unlike the WTO — where NGOs and developing nations have kicked open some doors that used to be blocked — CETA and the TPP are still being negotiated secretly. Canadians need to demand more information about trade agreements, and they need to be very wary of any argument that is based on calculating the GVC.
Reference
Aaron Sydor (2011). <i>Global Value Chains: Impacts and Implications</i>. Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada
Fazil Ismail. (20120) <i>Is the Doha Round dead? What is the way forward?</i> Brooks World Poverty Institute.
Martin Roy, Juan Marchetti and Hoe Lim. (2006) <i>Services Liberalization in the New Generation of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs): How Much Further than the GATS?</i> World Trade Organization.
Scott Sinclair. (2011). <i>Municipalities, Progressive Purchasing Polwer and the Canada EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA)</i>. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
About Amy Alexandra Wood
Amy Alexandra Wood is a fourth year Political Science and Social Justice and Peace Studies student at King's University College at the University of Western Ontario. She was in Geneva in September 2012 at the World Trade Organization Public Forum as a representative of civil society and to conduct research
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