The truth about the Doha Round

John Madeley

The Doha round under the World Trade Organisation auspices was to be a hailed “development round” for the poor. But it was anything but one.

Despite being billed as “Bretton Woods 2” the G20 leaders meeting in Washington in November came up with little of substance. World leaders agree to instruct their trade ministers to try to conclude the Doha Round by the end of the year, as they believe this would help to stimulate the global economy.

The Doha Round was supposed to be a development round. Leaders of Western countries see it differently. They see it as a device to boost the global economy. And this is the second time that Doha has been used this way. Look at how the Round came to be launched.

The World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) meeting in Seattle in late 1999 was called to launch a new round of trade liberalisation measures. It failed. It failed basically because developing countries were united in their view that trade liberalisation was not helping the poor.

The first few months after the Seattle meeting found trade liberalisation advocates in a state of shock. The realisation dawned on WTO officials that developing countries had been treated badly and that they had fences to build. Mike Moore, the then WTO director-general, began to talk in earnest about making the next round of talks a “development round” for the poor. “Development-related issues are at the forefront of the new work programme,” he said. Developing countries felt the tide was moving their way.

Attention began to turn to WTO’s next Ministerial meeting in November 2001 in Doha. In May that year, 2001, the big Western countries - the US, EU, Japan and Canada - launched “a diplomatic effort to coax developing countries into backing the start of a global trade liberalisation round”. They had far from given up on their trade liberalisation agenda.

Western

Developing countries wanted changes in WTO rules to make the Round to be launched in Doha, a genuine development round. But in the months preceding Doha, there was huge concern among them about the stance of Western countries. The Malaysian ambassador in Geneva, said, for example:

“It is abundantly clear the differences in positions are intractable. We run the risk of a ‘Seattle Two’ if we continue with the all-or-nothing course....It is clear we are in a state of impasse. We characterise the situation as discouraging, discomforting, demoralising and even depressing”.

On August 31 and September 1, 2001 a WTO “mini-ministerial” was held in Mexico. Seventeen countries were invited to attend. But the meeting made little progress. Then 10 days later came 9/11. It is not possible to over-estimate the importance of this for what happened in Doha.

9/11 injected a new impetus into the West’s preparations for the Doha meeting and was a major factor leading to the launch of a new round.

The US and EU used 9/11’s aftermath to push the need for another round. Robert Zoellick of the US and Pascal Lamy, then of the EU, claimed that a new round would revive the world economy from recession and will send a positive signal to the stock markets.

Developing countries felt the situation was being used to manipulate them into accepting a new trade liberalising round. An Africa trade negotiator said: “We have been in recession for about 10 to 20 years now. Do you think the current ‘recession’ affects us? The IMF and World Bank policies under Structural Adjustment have already brought us under tremendous strains. The new round isn’t our answer to our recession.”

Naomi Klein told a meeting in London: “The free traders didn’t take much time to mourn after September 11th. The US and EU are using this moment of distraction to ram through their trade agenda. It’s obscene. The US is re-branding the trade talks as part of the war on terrorism - if you’re not with us you’re against us.”

Flexibility

Seven African countries - Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Zambia - asked the WTO secretariat to carry out a study of the impact of trade liberalisation before launching another trade round. Structural adjustment policies they said, did not offer much flexibility in their tariff-cutting exercises.

“Consequently, many businesses were shut down as uncontrolled imports flowed into the countries, resulting in widespread unemployment and the collapse of local industries”, they said.

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