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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: RealMuLan who wrote (517)8/26/2003 11:38:50 PM
From: RealMuLan  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 6370
 
China's agricultural influence starts to grow within WTO
By Carl Mortished



CHINA has begun to put its cards on the table at the World Trade Organisation and the balance of power in the global trade negotiations is shifting very gradually to the South.
The signal came last week when a group of developing nations formed an ad hoc alliance to oppose an American and European plan to reform trade in agriculture. With the Cancún WTO summit a fortnight away, trade intermediaries are negotiating frantically in the corridors, doing deals and making alliances.

But this one is different. Three large, rapidly industrialising nations, Brazil, India and South Africa, have joined hands with the world’s most populous country. The group comprises 12 others, including Argentina, Mexico and Thailand, but it is the four big guns, each a leading regional power, that pull the strings.

Beijing is joining a former enemy; the issue of Tibet, a running sore that divides the two countries more effectively than the Himalayas, has been put aside. Likewise, Delhi is not playing up Chinese support for Pakistan. The countries have found common ground and it is exciting delegates and observers at the WTO’s Geneva headquarters. Some speculate that the group of four might become a more permanent feature of global trade talks. Celine Charveriat, of Oxfam, said; “It is the first time the emerging economic powers from the Third World are getting together to challenge the status quo.”

If the group survives it will be formidable, accounting for two thirds of the world’s farmers and more than half of its cereal production. Its members want to end US and EU farm subsidies but keep tariffs to protect their farmers from cheap American rice and wheat imports. In that respect they differ from the Cairns group, an alliance of farm exporters, including Canada and Australia. Once influential in the WTO, the Cairns lobby may see its star wane as the developing nations push their own interests.

They may have a champion in China, which fought hard to join the WTO. It was forced to make big concessions, such as the dismantling of tariff walls and other bars to market access, such as foreign ownership restrictions. At the same time it had to swallow safeguard measures allowing America and Europe to keep curbing imports of Chinese textiles for four years after such quotas end under WTO rules in 2004.

Nevertheless, China joined with a fanfare of celebration at the WTO summit in Doha in November 2001. Then, for almost two years, it watched and waited while the big trading nations argued and procrastinated over implementing the Doha “development agenda”. China used the time well. “They have spent time working with the Brazilians. For a new member they have been very effective in the things they have done,” one US diplomat said.


timesonline.co.uk



To: RealMuLan who wrote (517)8/27/2003 12:34:49 AM
From: BubbaFred  Respond to of 6370
 
That's right, and it would be so righteous for US to take NK refugees. Those refugees would help US lower labor cost and higher productivity. No joke, those refugees can work 20 hours a day at half the salary of American workers.



To: RealMuLan who wrote (517)8/27/2003 1:01:09 PM
From: Diana  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 6370
 
Why not the US takes all those NK refugees? such a joke!

Simple answer, because US doesn't have a border contiguous to NK. The refugees have to walk somewhere.

Bringing about the non-combat downfall of an insane, bomb-brewing dictator would certainly be in China's national interests also. No one is asking China to be altruistic.

When things calm down in NK, these folks will probably want to go back to their families and ancestral lands.