>X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> It's Time to Challenge the WTO
>
>
>
> The US works to undermine the UN by promoting the WTO.
>
> Dr. Walden Bello, professor of sociology and public
> administration at the University of the Philippines,
> explains how UNCTAD (UN Conference on Trade and
> Development) can be used to defend us against the WTO.
>
>
> - Seattle provides an opportunity for UNCTAD to reclaim
> a central role in setting the rules for global trade and
> development.
>
>
> - the assumption that the full integration of the
> developing countries into the world economy is the
> way to prosperity must be questioned
>
>
> - UNCTAD should challenge the role of the WTO as the
> ultimate arbiter of trade and development issues.
>
>
> - Emphasis, not on the integration of agriculture into
> world trade, but the integration of trade into a
> development strategy
>
>
>
>From: "Walden Bello" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Organization: FOCUS on the Global South
>To: Bob Olsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 18:03:20 +0700
>Subject: Re: Why reform of WTO is wrong
>
>
>UNCTAD: Time to Lead, Time to Challenge the WTO
>
>
>By Walden Bello*
>
>
>UNCTAD (UN Conference on Trade and Development) is being held at a
>very auspicious moment for the South. Two central institutions of
>the Northern-dominated system of economic global governance, the
>International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, are undergoing
>a severe crisis of legitimacy and have, at least temporarily, lost
>their sense of direction. The South has the opportunity to seize
>the initiative, frame the terms of debate on the future of global
>governance, and push for the creation or institutions that will truly
>serve its interests. UNCTAD can serve as the catalyst for this process.
>
>A Backward Glance
>
>To envision a strategy for the future, it is essential to glance back
>at the past, to reclaim the best in UNCTAD's history and to avoid its
>mistakes. The place to begin this analysis is the period of
>decolonization in the 1950's and 1960's. The emergence of scores of
>newly independent states took place in the politically charged
>atmosphere of the Cold War, but although they were often split between
>East and West in their political alliances, Third World countries
>gravitated toward an economic agenda that had two underlying thrusts:
>rapid development and a global redistribution of wealth.
>
>While the more radical expression of this agenda in the shape of the
>Leninist theory of imperialism drew much attention and, needless to
>say, condemnation in some quarters, it was the more moderate version
>that was most influential in drawing otherwise politically diverse
>Third World governments into a common front. This was the vision,
>analysis, and program of action forged by Raul Prebisch, an Argentine
>economist who, from his base at the United Economic Commission for
>Latin America (CEPAL), won a global following with his numerous
>writings. Developed in the late 1950's and early 1960's, Prebisch's
>theory centered on the worsening terms of trade between
>industrialized and non-industrialized countries, an equation which
>posited that more and more of the South's raw materials and
>agricultural products were needed to purchase fewer and fewer of the
>North's manufactured products. Moreover, the trading relationship
>was likely to get worse since Northern producers were developing
>substitutes for raw materials from the South, and Northern
>consumers, according to Engels' Law, would spend a decreasing
>proportion of their income on agricultural products from the South.
>
>Known in development circles as "structuralism," Prebisch's theory
>of "bloodless but inexorable exploitation," as one writer described
>it, served as the inspiration for Third World organizations,
>formations, and programs which sprang up in the 1960's and 1970's,
>including the Non-Aligned Movement, Group of 77, Organization of
>Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and the New International
>Economic Order (NIEO). It was also central to the establishment of
>the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964, which
>became over the next decade the principal vehicle used by the Third
>World countries in their effort to restructure the world economy.
>With Prebisch as its first Secretary General, UNCTAD advanced a
>global reform strategy with three main prongs. The first was
>commodity price stabilization through the negotiation of price
>floors below which commodity prices would not be allowed to fall.
>
>The second was a scheme of preferential tariffs, or allowing Third
>World exports of manufactures, in the name of development, to enter
>First World markets at lower tariff rates than those applied to
>exports from other industrialized countries. The third was an
>expansion and acceleration of foreign assistance, which, in
>UNCTAD's view, was not charity but "compensation, a rebate to the
>Third World for the years of declining commodity purchasing power."
>UNCTAD also sought to gain legitimacy for the Southern countries'
>use of protectionist trade policy as as a mechanism for
>industrialization and demanded accelerated transfer of technology
>to the South.
>
>UNCTAD at its Apogee
>
>To a greater or lesser degree, the structuralist critique came to
>be reflected in the approaches of other key economic agencies of
>the United Nations secretariat, such as the Economic and Social
>Council (ECOSOC) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP),
>and it became the dominant viewpoint among the majority at the
>General Assembly. Instead of promoting aid, UNCTAD focused on
>changing the rules of international trade, and in this enterprise
>it registered some successes. During the fourth conference of
>UNCTAD (UNCTAD IV) in Nairobi in 1976, agreement was reached,
>without dissent from the developed countries, on the Integrated
>Program for Commodities (IPC). The IPC stipulated that agreements
>for 18 specified commodities would be negotiated or renegotiated
>with the principal aim of avoiding excessive price fluctuations and
>stabilizing commodity prices at levels remunerative to the producers
>and equitable to consumers. It was also agreed that a Common Fund
>would be set up that would regulate prices when they either fell
>below or climbed too far above the negotiated price targets.
>
>UNCTAD and Group of 77 pressure was also central to the IMF's
>establishing a new window, the Compensatory Financing Facility
>(CFF), which was meant to assist Third World countries in managing
>foreign exchange crises created by sharp falls in the prices of
>the primary commodities they exported.
>
>Another UNCTAD achievement was getting the industrialized countries
>to accept the principle of preferential tariffs for developing
>countries. Some 26 developed countries were involved in 16 separate
>"General System of Preferences" schemes by the early 1980's.
>
>These concessions were, of course, limited. In the case of
>commodity price stabilization, it soon became apparent that the
>rich countries had replaced a strategy of confrontation with a
>Fabian, or evasive, strategy of frustrating concrete agreements.
>A decade after UNCTAD IV, only one new commodity stabilization
>agreement, for natural rubber, had been negotiated; an existing
>agreement on cocoa was not operative; and agreements on tin and
>sugar had collapsed.
>
>Right-wing Reaction and the Demonization of the UN
>
>By the late seventies, however, even such small concessions were
>viewed with alarm by increasingly influential sectors of the U.S.
>establishment. Such concessions within the UN system were seen in
>the context of other developments in North-South relations, which
>appeared to show that the strategy of liberal containment promoted
>by Washington's liberal internationalists, who held sway for most
>of the post-war period up to the late seventies, had not produced
>what it promised to deliver: security for Western interests in the
>South through the cooptation of Third World elites. The United
>Nations system was a central feature of the demonology of the South
>that right-wing circles articulated in the late seventies and early
>eighties. In their view, the UN had become the main vehicle for the
>South's strategy to bring about the New International Economic Order.
>As the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation saw it, the
>governments of the South devoted "enormous time and resources to
>spreading the NIEO ideology throughout the UN system and beyond.
>Virtually no UN agencies and bureaus have been spared." The
>South's effort to redistribute global economic power via UN
>mechanisms was viewed as a concerted one: Private business data
>flows are under attack internationally and by individual Third World
>countries; proposals for strict controls of the international
>pharmaceutical trade are pending before more than one UN body; other
>international agencies are drafting restrictive codes of conduct for
>multinational corporations; and UNESCO has proposed international
>restraints on the press.
>
>Especially threatening to the Foundation was the effort by the
>Third World to "redistribute natural resources" by bringing the
>seabed, space, and Antarctica under their control through Law of the
>Sea Treaty, the Agreement Governing Activities of States on the Moon
>and Other Celestial Bodies (called the "Moon Treaty"), and an
>ongoing UN study and debate over Antarctica. Malaysian Prime
>Minister Mahathir Bin Mohamad, the principal architect of the effort
>to get the UN to claim Antartica, told the General Assembly "all the
>unclaimed wealth of this earth" is the "common heritage of mankind,"
>and therefore subject to the political control of the Third World.
>
>Crisis of the UN Development System
>
>As the 1980's unfolded, the North's drive to discipline the South
>escalated. Taking advantage of the Third World debt crisis, the
>IMF and the World Bank subjected over 70 countries to structural
>adjustment programs, the main elements of which were radical
>deregulation, liberalization, and privatization. This was
>accompanied by a major effort to emasculate the United Nations
>as a vehicle for the Southern agenda.
>
>Wielding the power of the purse, the United States, whose
>contribution funds some 20-25 per cent of the UN budget, moved to
>silence NIEO rhetoric in all the key UN institutions dealing with
>the North-South divide: the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC),
>the United Nations Development Program, and the General Assembly.
>US pressure resulted as well in the effective dismantling of the UN
>Center on Transnational Corporations, whose high quality work in
>tracking the activities of the TNCs in the South, had earned the
>ire of the TNCs. Also abolished was the post of Director-General
>for International Economic Cooperation and Development, which "had
>been one of the few concrete outcomes, and certainly the most
>noteworthy, of the efforts of the developing countries during the
>NIEO negotiations to secure a stronger UN presence in support of
>international economic cooperation and development."
>
>But the focus of the Northern counteroffensive was the defanging,
>if not dismantling of UNCTAD. After giving in to the South during
>the UNCTAD IV negotiations in Nairobi in 1976 by agreeing to the
>creation of the commodity stabilization scheme known as the
>Integrated Program for Commodities, the North, during UNCTAD V in
>Belgrade, refused the South's program of debt forgiveness and other
>measures intended to revive Third World economies and thus
>contribute to global recovery at a time of worldwide recession.
>The northern offensive escalated during UNCTAD VIII,
>held in Cartagena in 1992. At this watershed meeting, the North
>successfully opposed all linkages of UNCTAD discussions with the
>Uruguay Round negotiations of the GATT and managed to erode UNCTAD's
>negotiation functions, thus calling its existence into question.
>
>This drastic curtailing of UNCTAD's scope was apparently not enough
>for certain Northern interests. For instance, the Geneva-based
>Independent Commission on Global Governance identified UNCTAD as
>one of agencies that could be abolished in order to streamline the
>UN system. The Commission's views apparently coincided with that
>of Karl Theodor Paschke, head of the newly created UN Office of
>Internal Oversight Services, who was quoted by Stern Magazine as
>saying that UNCTAD had been made obsolete by the creation of the
>World Trade Organization.
>
>UNCTAD on the Defensive
>
>During UNCTAD VIII, the North pushed to limit UNCTAD's function's
>to "analysis, consensus building on some trade related issues, and
>technical assistance." But even in this limited role, UNCTAD
>managed during the late eighties and nineties to perform
>indispensable tasks for the South.
>
>Among other things, UNCTAD's research and analytical work:
>
>- showed that structural adjustment was leading to stagnation, not
> to the promised growth path promised by the World Bank and the
> IMF;
>
>- underlined the crippling debt overhang that made any development
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