ISIS Report, 20 March 2002
Rough Road from Doha to Johannesburg
WTO's new mandate raises a key question: Who will decide our common
future?
The new mandate could intensify burning fossil fuels, logging native
forests, depleting fisheries, use of toxic chemicals, and release of
GMOs.
Victor Menotti, Director of the International Forum on Globalisation
Environment Program gives us a critical analysis.
Trade ministers from 140 nations gathered in Doha, Qatar last November
to
give the World Trade Organization (WTO) a historic new mandate to
restrain
governments from regulating global corporations, removing the last
shreds
of people s rights to self determination and access to resources at
every
level. It is the biggest threat to the agenda for the World Summit on
Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg (Rio plus Ten).
The Doha agenda (Box 1) has empowered the WTO to increase corporate
control
over natural resources by allowing decisions on their use to be driven
even
more closely by the short-term demands of global financial markets. It
intensifies export-based farming, forestry, fishing, as well as fossil
fuel
burning, mining, and exploitation of other natural resources including
water. It eliminates more conservation and community development
policies
as unfair trade barriers. It determines who captures the remnants of the
world s collapsing natural resources, starting with the planet s
depleted
fisheries, which has been placed on the WTO agenda by World Wildlife
Fund.
It subordinates multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs, Box 2) to
the
rights of corporations.
The Doha agenda was the result of an illegitimate, manipulative,
untransparent and deceitful process. The result was to leave all the
concerns and demands of the majority developing countries off the main
agenda and relegated to an addendum text (see Deceit and manipulation
at
Doha, Science in Society 13/14, February 2002).
Box 1
The Doha Agenda
New mandates were added to the final declaration:
Trade and environment - subordinates multilateral environmental
agreements
to trade.
Market Access - to free logging, fishing and mining.
Anti-Dumping may allow cheap imports to kill local industries and
livelihoods.
Subsidies for fisheries may prevent protection of collapsing fisheries
The disputed mandates, the Singapore issues were also included:
Investment - return of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, that
effectively forbids governments to protect local investments against
corporations.
Government procurement - effectively disables governments from
controlling
how the tax-dollars are spent.
Competition - breaks up publicly-owned enterprises, not global
monopolies.
The MEAs include
Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Chemicals
Kyoto Protocol on Climate change
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
Basel Convention on Trade in Hazardous Waste
Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety
POPs Treaty on Persistent Organic Pollutants
The new mandates
In perhaps the WTO s most direct threat to sustainable development and
the
entire Rio/Johannesburg process, the final Doha declaration expands the
WTO
s mandate to unilaterally determine its relationship to the trade
sanctions
that enforce multilateral environmental agreements. The Doha mandate to
clarify the relationship between trade and environment can only be
understood as a move to subordinate the MEAs to trade. Trade and not
environment ministers are leading the negotiations, and the MEAs
secretariats are given only observer status. Although it is stated that
there shall be no prejudged outcomes , it is also stated that the
outcomes
shall not add to or diminish the rights and obligations of Members
under
existing WTO agreement. This can only mean that no trade rules can be
changed. The precautionary approach will go out of the window.
Market access will mean the expansion of exports and the elimination of
legal protections that ensure sustainable use of natural resources.
Particularly affected are forestry, fishing and farming. Negotiations
are
over the elimination of tariffs (import taxes) and so-called non-tariff
measures.
Forest tariffs were an issue of great concern to protestors at Seattle.
Popularly known as the global Free Logging Agreement, forest
conservationists succeeded in getting the US Trade Representative Robert
Zoellick to publish the first, ever, environmental assessment of trade
liberalisation, released just before the 1999 Ministerial. In the
report,
done by a timber-industry-funded group, trade officials buried the real
findings: tariff reductions would result in increased logging in some of
the world s most threatened original forests inhabited by indigenous
peoples.
Cutting tariffs reduces wood prices for consumers, in turn stimulating
more
wasteful consumption, especially in the rich nations. The effects on
cutting tariffs in fisheries are similar. Tariff cuts for minerals,
fuels,
chemicals and other non-agricultural
