Cancun in focus

While everybody is tuned in to what’s the latest in the political front, which I say is very entertaining at the least, our government negotiators are busy preparing for the 5th World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting which will be held in Cancun, Mexico from Sept. 9-14.

The main task if this meeting will be to take stock of progress in negotiations and other work under the Doha (the site of the 4th ministerial meeting) development agenda. The Cancun meeting will likewise provide any necessary political guidance and take decisions as necessary to place the Doha work at a higher level.

The ministerial conference is the organization’s highest-level decision-making body. It meets at least once every two years, as required by the Marrakesh agreement, the WTO’s founding charter.

Negotiators from all over the world will have the opportunity during the Cancun meeting to review the operation and functioning of the multilateral trading system and to make general statements related to it. The expected outcome include a ministerial text and decisions, including those relating to the accession of new members to the WTO agreement.

The Cancun ministerial will be the most important meeting to date for the WTO, because of the fundamental topics to be addressed (agriculture, intellectual property, services, investment) and the new issues being proposed affecting sectors which are of vital importance to world economy.

Expect however that like in Seattle and Doha, there will be protest actions from groups which oppose the idea of trade globalization. As negotiations have ground to a halt in Geneva, civil society organizations are stepping up their efforts to mount massive mobilizations and civil disobedience in Cancun and elsewhere in the world during the week of the meeting.

Who can blame them? After all, many economies, including that of the Philippines, have yet to benefit from the onset of trade liberalization.

The stalemate in negotiations is most evident in agriculture. The proposed tariff reductions in the Harbinson draft (prepared by agricultural negotiations chairman Stuart Harbinson) is seen by the US and the Cairns Group of developed and developing country agro-exporters as too shallow while the EU and Japan see them as too deep. The developing countries are concerned that the draft requires very substantial tariff cuts from them.

In a recent article, Walden Bello , executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, noted that a negative development is that the EU and the US, in pushing for negotiating advantage, have split the ranks of the developing world. The developing countries in the Cairns Group, like Brazil, Uruguay, and Thailand, are siding with the US against the EU and Japan. The EU has hit back by gaining the support of India and many other developing countries for a counterproposal for agricultural liberalization that would replicate the allegedly more flexible liberalization formula of the Uruguay Round.

Let’s just hope that rather than take sides, our negotiators will consider what is best for our farming sector which has already been battered and badly bruised by the influx of cheap imported goods, not to mention smuggled ones. That instead of agreeing to further tariff cuts, our team will support a freeze on existing rates until such time that that the playing field is even (as if such will ever happen).

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