Impasse: Are We Nearing the End of the Corporate Globalization Era?

By Deborah James, AlterNet. Posted August 21, 2008.

When the history of the seismic shifts occurring today in the global economy is written, the failure in July 2008 of corporate interests and some governments to expand the World Trade Organization (WTO) through the Doha Round will stand as a watershed moment.

It was in this lakeside town where negotiators threw in the towel on their seven fruitless years of trying to expand a particular, corporate-driven set of policies, to which the majority of governments have said "no", time and time again (in Seattle in 1999, Mexico in 2003, and Geneva in 2006). WTO Director General Pascal Lamy attempted a last-minute push to conclude a Doha deal by calling for an exclusive, invitation-only mini-Ministerial of around 30 of the WTO's 153 members in Geneva last month, despite wide divergences in political positions within the areas of negotiation, and despite the fact the Bush administration has no authority to sign any potential deal.

And since it wasn't enough of an abrogation of democratic process to exclude four-fifths of the WTO's membership from the so-called "Green Room" negotiations, when talks failed to converge amongst those 30 countries, Lamy continued negotiations with a mere seven members, including almost all of the developed world, yet excluding all of Africa -- in a round that proponents still shamelessly refer to as a "Development Round." Many developing countries such as Bolivia and Kenya and even the host, Switzerland, raised significant process concerns about their exclusion from the meeting, but their concerns were dismissed by Lamy.

Were Africans allowed to participate in the secret discussions, they would have demanded resolution on issues such as the reform of U.S. cotton subsidies to 20,000 domestic producers, which encourage overproduction and erode the income of 10 million African cotton farmers in countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad, driving many of them out of business and reducing revenues key to health care and education budgets for the poor. Some observers have highlighted Africans' strong stand on development issues when they were allowed at the table. Many have even argued that rich countries' desire to avoid key African issues such as cotton is actually what led to the collapse, but this part of the story seems just too ugly to have been repeated in the U.S. press.

Recent coverage in the United States of the talks' failure has focused on the negotiating positions of various countries, particularly blaming India and China. But when one delves into the underlying issues, it becomes clear that much more was at stake in the negotiations than "trade," and that the collapse was due to forces far greater than individual countries' positions -- including issues surrounding the food, climate, and financial crises -- as well as the lack of progress on development due to the failure of neoliberal policies to actually promote growth or reduce poverty. Given the changes in international political dynamics as well as the global agenda, the collapse in the current negotiations will have far-reaching impacts beyond just the WTO.

Food Sovereignty or Food Crisis

Take agriculture, for example, the issue cited by most accounts to have provoked the collapse. India, supported by the vast majority of developing countries, fought for the right to be allowed within the WTO to protect its farmers, food security, and rural development from the volatility of the commodity markets. Surges of subsidized imported products have so devastated local agricultural producers, who represent three-fifths of the workforce in a population of 1.1 billion people, that it is said that over 100,000 farmers have committed suicide in recent years. However, U.S. negotiators wouldn't allow for the protections, and demanded increased access to poor countries' markets for its agribusiness exports, while refusing to reduce the cap on domestic subsidies below twice their current rate.

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Deborah James is the Director of International Programs for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and a Board member of Global Exchange.

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