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
Tuesday September 2, 2003
The Guardian
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%. 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.
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."
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. 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. The United States imposes tariffs of between
0-1% 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". The deadline for
producing an agreed text for the Cancun meeting was May 31.
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%. 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", and a
negotiating text to this effect was meant to have been produced
by March 31. Again, the promise has been broken, and again
the poor have been told that only if 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) 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.
· Next week: How do we best support the demands of the poor
world?
www.monbiot.com
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