http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=602
See this same article
at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0902-07.htm
Published on Tuesday, September 2, 2003 by the Guardian / UK
The Worst
of Times
In the First of a Three-part Series on Trade,
George Monbiot Argues That the Rich World's Brutal Diplomacy is
Worsening the Plight of Poor Nations
Le Monde, C'est Nous
At the world trade
summit next week, the rich world will ensure
that the poor world stays that way. This is the first of a three-part
series on trade
By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 2nd September 2003
The world is beginning
to look like France, a few years before the
Revolution. There are no reliable wealth statistics from that
time,
but the disparities are unlikely to have been greater than they
are
today. The wealthiest 5% of the world's people now earn 114 times
as
much as the poorest 5%.1 The 500 richest people on earth now own
$1.54 trillion -- more than the entire gross domestic product
of
Africa, or the combined annual incomes of the poorest half of
humanity.2
Now, just as then,
the desperation of the poor counterpoises the obscene
consumption of the rich. Now, just as then, the sages employed
by the
global aristocrats -- in the universities, the thinktanks, the
newspapers
and magazines -- contrive to prove that we possess the best of
all
possible systems in the best of all possible worlds. In the fortress
of Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay we have our Bastille, in which
men
are imprisoned without charge or trial.
Like the court at Versailles,
the wealth and splendour of the
nouveau-ancien regime will be on display, not far from the stinking
slums in which hunger reigns, at next week's world trade summit
in Cancun in Mexico. Between banquets and champagne receptions,
men like the European trade commissioner Pascal Lamy and the
US trade representative Robert Zoellick will dismiss with their
customary arrogance the needs of the hungry majority. There
we will witness the same corruption, of both purpose and
execution, the same conflation of the private good with the
public good: le monde, c'est nous. As Charles Dickens wrote
of the ruling class of that earlier time: "the leprosy of
unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance".3
The unreality begins
in Mexico with the World Trade Organisation's
statement of intent. It will, its director-general says, ensure
that "development issues lie at the heart" of the negotiations.4
The new talks, in other words, are designed to help the people
of the poor nations to escape from poverty. In almost every respect
they are destined to do the opposite. Every promise the rich world
has made the poor world is being broken. Every demand for the
further expropriation of the wealth of the poor is being pursued
with ruthless persistence.
Take, for example,
the issue of "tariffs", or taxes on trade.
A new report by Oxfam, published today, shows that the poorer
a nation is, the higher the rates of tax it must pay in order
to export its goods.5 The United States imposes tariffs of
between zero and one per cent on major imports from Britain,
France, Japan and Germany, but taxes of 14 or 15% on produce
from Bangladesh, Cambodia and Nepal. The British government
does the same: Sri Lanka and Uruguay must pay eight times
as much to sell their goods over here as the United States.
This happens for two
reasons. The first is that the poorer
nations can't fight back. The second is that, without taxes,
the poor would outcompete the rich. The stiffest tariffs are
imposed on goods such as textiles and farm products, in which
the weak nations possess a commercial advantage.
The current trade talks
were launched with the promise that tariffs
would be reduced or eliminated, "in particular on products
of export
interest to developing countries."6 The deadline for producing
an
agreed text for the Cancun meeting was May 31st. Because the rich
nations have blocked every attempt to agree upon the wording,
nothing has been produced. Instead, last week the European Union,
the US and Canada submitted a new paper. It proposes that the
poorest countries must do the most to cut their trade taxes.
Bolivia and Kenya must reduce their tariffs by 80%, the
EU by 28% and the US by just 24%.7 It appears to be a calculated
insult, designed to prevent any agreement on this issue from
taking place.
Nor has any progress
been made on farm subsidies. In 1994,
the rich countries agreed that they would phase them out,
if the poor countries promised to open their markets to western
corporations. The poor nations kept their promise, the rich
countries broke theirs. The new round of talks is supposed
to lead to the "phasing out [of] all forms of export subsidies",8
and a negotiating text to this effect was meant to have been
produced by 31st March. Again, the promise has been broken,
and again the poor have been told that if only they grant the
rich world's corporations even greater access to their
economies, farm subsidies will come to an end.
But the powerful nations,
while refusing to address the
demands of the poor, press their own claims with brutal
diplomacy. They now insist that the "development round"
be used to force nations to grant foreign corporations
the same rights as domestic ones; to open their public
services to the private sector and to invite foreign companies
to bid to run them. What this means, as nearly all the big
multinational corporations are based in the rich world,
is a rich world takeover of the poor world's economy.
Lamy and Zoellick and
the governments (such as ours)
they represent must know that these demands are impossible
for the weaker countries to meet. They must know that the
combination of their broken promises and their outrageous
terms could force the weaker governments to walk out of the
trade talks in Cancun, just as they did in Seattle in 1999.
They must know that this will mean the end of the World Trade
Organisation. And this now appears to be their aim. Subverted
and corrupted as the WTO is, it remains a multilateral body
in which the poor nations can engage in collective bargaining
and, in theory, outvote the rich. This never happens,
because the rich nations have bypassed its decision-making
structures. But the danger remains, so the EU and the
US appear to wish to destroy it, and to replace world
trade agreements with even more coercive single-country
deals. The narrow path campaigners have to tread is
to expose the injustices of the proposed agreements
without assisting the rich world's underlying agenda
by demanding that "the WTO has got to go".
But eventually, as
in France, there must be a revolution.
It is likely to happen only when there is a globalised crisis
of survival: a worldwide shortage of grain, for example
(like the deficit which followed the bad harvest of 1788) or
- and this is currently more likely and more imminent
- a shortage of fossil fuel. In previous columns I have
suggested some of the means (such as a threatened collective
default on the debt)9 by which this revolution can take
place. Until the nouveau-ancien regime has been overthrown,
and Lamy and Zoellick and their kind are (metaphorically)
swinging from the lampposts, the rich, like the aristocrats
of France, will devise ever more inventive means of
dispossessing the poor.
This is the first installment
of George Monbiot's three-part
series on trade.
- Next week: How do we best support the demands of the poor
world?
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. United Nations Development
Programme, 2003. Human Development
Report 2003. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford.
2. John Cavanagh and
Sarah Anderson, 2002. World's Billionaires
Take a Hit, But Still Soar. Institute of Policy Studies.
http://www.ips-dc.org/projects/global_econ/billionaires.htm
3. Charles Dickens,
1859. A Tale of Two Cities (taken from the
Wordsworth Classics edition, 1993).
4. Supachai Panitchpakdi,
25 November 2002. The Doha Development
Agenda: Challenges Ahead. Speech to the European Parliament, Brussels.
5. Oxfam, 2nd September
2003. Briefing Paper 53: Running into the Sand:
why failure at the Cancun trade talks threatens the world's poorest
people. Oxfam, Oxford.
6. World Trade Organisation,
November 2001. The Doha Ministerial
Declaration, paragraph 16: Market access for non-agricultural
products.
7. Oxfam, August 2003.
New standards in double standards: the EU-US-Canada
proposals for non-agricultural market access in the WTO. Oxfam,
Oxford.
8. World Trade Organisation,
November 2001. The Doha Ministerial
Declaration, paragraph 13: Agriculture.
9. This idea is explained
in George Monbiot, 2003.
The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order, Flamingo,
London.
2nd September 2003
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