‘Once upon a time in Mexico’

Lucy Michaels

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks failed in the holiday resort of Cancun, Mexico last week, and I cannot but highlight what a significant development this is. This isn’t just Lefty over-excitement at the failure of some corporate-sponsored international meeting. The ideological project of corporate globalisation through the WTO and ‘free trade’ is now in trouble, although where we go from here and who will benefit is still uncertain.
The talks collapsed when the Kenyan representative, George Odour Ongwen, who was speaking for an unprecedented alliance of Southern countries, walked out of a ‘Green Room’ meeting,1 furious that the EU negotiator, Pascal Lamy, would not back down on proposals for the inclusion of ‘new issues’ in the WTO. When the walk-out was announced, he was swiftly joined by South Korea and India. These bold acts of defiance by Southern countries were greeted with spontaneous celebrations by NGO’s, grassroots groups and, interestingly, some of the world’s press gathered in Cancun. While some were surprised at this outcome, others had already predicted that Cancun would be another Seattle.

Over the last six months, those following the WTO process sensed the failure in the air. As each country’s negotiating positions became clear, a North/South divide emerged illustrating fundamental differences in all areas of the talks. Although the US and European Union (EU) have had their own battles, with a trade war developing over the EU’s de facto moratorium on commercialisation for GM crops, the US and EU amazingly found agreement in two key areas: in agriculture and on demands to expand the global liberalisation project to so-called ‘new issues’. This includes the trade in services (GATS), the liberalisation of competition and investment (an MAI-style agreement which would allow a free rein for multinational corporations to operate entirely as they wish anywhere in the world), trade facilitation and the liberalisation of government procurement.

In both agriculture and ‘new issues’, Southern coalitions developed to oppose the US and EU positions. At the fourth WTO ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar in November 2001, India stood alone in opposing the inclusion of ‘new issues’ in the negotiations. By Cancun, nearly 100 of the WTO member nations stood opposed to ‘new issues’ claiming that the US and EU’s adherence to these issues illustrated that they were not committed to development for the global South or even to the so-called ‘development agenda’ agreed in Doha.

In agriculture, Brazil and India, who in the past were more used to quibbling over subsidies and tariffs, drew up a comprehensive agricultural policy in almost total opposition to what the EU and US were demanding. China and other ‘developing’ countries joined this bloc that became the G21 group (as more countries joined it became the G20+ group).
The G20+ group is demanding sweeping cuts in US and EU domestic support to farmers, as well as the elimination of export subsidies. These are both factors that keep the price of imported grain into developing countries artificially low (known as dumping). As they see it, these practices, (whilst keeping Northern farmers in business and healthily lining the pockets of multinational agribusiness especially the big grain traders) destroy the livelihood of Southern farmers as well as destroying their potential to develop internal markets. In a previous round of trade negotiations in 1994, the EU and US agreed to cut their subsidies and create a level playing field. However, instead they have increased subsidies. The US farm bill in 2002 increased subsidies by $82 billion. The G20+ group is also demanding greater market access for Southern countries to the ‘protected’ markets of the EU and US.
The EU attempted to link the ‘new issues’ negotiations to the agriculture negotiations even though the Doha Declaration delinked these two areas. It seems that the EU attempted to offer concessions in agriculture on the basis that the ‘new issues’ agenda would be adopted. The Southern countries, however, would not be duped into this.

The talks essentially failed because the EU and US approached these negotiations with their usual tactics - to bribe, bully and break legs. This time, however, as with the celebrated victory in Seattle in 1999, Southern countries said Enough! supported by NGOs and lively and determined protests on the streets. Resentment amongst the Southern countries had been building all week, not just with the disagreement over the content of the talks, but also over frustration with the process. The WTO is supposedly a consensus-based organisation, however, the WTO leadership and secretariat essentially ignored the G20+ proposals on agriculture when they offered a second draft final declaration.

The Cancun ministerial took place in the shadow of the martyrdom of a Korean farmer, Lee Kyung-Hae, who took his own life at the barricades during the farmers’ protest on 10th September. Lee was the former president of the Korean Advanced Farmer’s Federation and identified the unfair WTO rules with the crisis faced by him and small farmers worldwide. His death made visible the farming crisis which has caused the unreported suicides of thousands of farmers worldwide from the UK to India. Mr Lee's death illustrates the deep despair and disempowerment felt by many at the policies of the WTO, and was a powerful and shocking act of defiance which must have steeled the resolve of Southern countries in the face of bullying by the EU and US. As US campaigner, Starhawk, said in tribute to Lee, his act ‘really made it very vivid and very real for all of us. This isn’t just an abstract battle, it’s truly about human lives’.

But this act should not overshadow the inspirational and life affirming actions which took place both in Cancun and around the world, to protest against the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the WTO and the unjust nature of the current ‘free trade’ regime: “current 'free trade' regime, including the arms trade (see DSEi report). Peter Rosset, co-director of Food First, a US based NGO, stated that the protests that took place on the Saturday in Cancun were ‘so powerful that we were all sure we had reached and passed through the turning point vis-a- vis the WTO’. Actions occurred all week with activists managing to out-fox around 10,000 federal and municipal police, private security guards and undercover cops to do actions and blockades well inside the 9 km security zone around the WTO.

Starhawk, in a radio interview for Greenpeace, explained that although the numbers were not huge due to the inaccessibility of Cancun (6000 on the biggest day), ‘to see campesinos, Mexican students, all these people from different places, cultures and organising styles, working together to learn how other groups and cultures organise and to be able to be part of that (is) a great privilege.’ She talked about the protests not just contesting power but also, in true Zapatista style, articulating a vision and reclaiming a space for it. Both symbolic space, such as the place where the fence had come down and where Lee had died (which had become a public gathering plaza instead of a traffic circle) and practical alternative space, such as the eco-village which became a showcase for permaculture with rainwater catchment and a simple water pump - a grey water system that purifies the water from handwashing and shower systems. Another inspirational event in Cancun was the first ever ‘Fair Trade’ Fair, bringing together around a hundred small fair trade producers from around the world.

Where does this leave us now?
The WTO, as a forum for determining trade rules and settling trade disputes, was set up in 1995 by powerful countries who have used it to make sure that their economic and political interests are maintained under the guise of ‘free trade’. At Cancun, in an inspirational show of solidarity, the weaker countries of the world refused to be bullied. It remains to be seen how this coalition of countries will go on to use their new found empowerment.

Many commentators are now referring to the WTO in the past tense. However, whereas a few years ago we would all have been celebrating unreservedly its imminent demise, the world we are living in is rapidly changing and becoming more unstable. Unlike previous administrations, the Bush administration makes no pretence about its aspirations for empire. Though civil society and Southern countries have successfully routed US and EU ambitions in Cancun, US trade representative Robert Zoellick had already threatened that, should the US not get what it wanted at the WTO, it would concentrate on bilateral and regional agreements like the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The need for a new global trade forum, not intrinsically undemocratic like the WTO, to negotiate fairer trade rules and to challenge US hegemony has never been more urgent.

With thanks to Luke Anderson for first hand accounts of the protests.
An IMC video about Cancun is also available - www.indymedia.org.uk

1. one of the small ‘informal’ meetings where the real decisions of the ministerial are made.

Further reading/listening

1. “Success or failure at the WTO?”
talk by Mark Ritchie, President of the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) 16th September 2003. See www.iatp.org or
http://208.155.173.254/ramgen/radiocancun/2003-09- 16_mritchie-cancun-wrapup.rm
2. Starhawk’s Cancun journals www.starhawk.org/activism/activism- writings/cancun_journals.html
Interview with Starhawk http://cancun.mediosindependientes.org/newswire/display/679/index.php
3. World Development Movement have some good articles and campaigns on their Cancun pages www.wdm.org.uk/campaign/cancun03/
Read WDM journals, especially article by Claire Joy about the impacts of trade liberalisation on Cancun itself. www.wdm.org.uk/campaign/cancun03/cancundiary2
4. ‘Business rules: Who pays the price?’
How corporate influence in the WTO impacts on people and the environment. Friends of the Earth International and Corporate Europe Obeservatory. August 2003.
5. ‘A threat to the rich: Forcing the poor countries to walk out of the Cancun trade talks may rebound on the West’.
by George Monbiot. 16th September 2003. The Guardian
6. The WTO Derailed at ‘Second Seattle’
In Cancun by Peter Rosset. 14th September 2003 www.foodfirst.org
7. ‘CBI tries to address ‘exploiter’ image’ Analysis PR Week 19 September 2003