Waarom de WTO geen oplossingen biedt (OWINFS, 19 juli 2008)

Geschreven door rob bleijerveld dinsdag, 22 juli 2008 00:50

Aan de vooravond van de minitop van de WTO, heeft de handelsorganisatie te maken met een wereldwijde oppostitie. Landen hebben echte oplossingen nodig voor voedsel- en klimaatcrises. Maar geen uitbreiding van de WTO. Tien argumenten op een rij.
(OWINFS, 19 juli 2008)

On Eve of “mini-Ministerial”, the WTO Faces Opposition Worldwide

Countries Need Real Solutions to the Food and Climate Crises, Not an Expansion of WTO; US has No Legal Authority to Sign a Potential Deal

World Trade Organization (WTO) Director General Pascal Lamy is making a last-minute attempt to push through a Doha deal by calling for a mini-Ministerial in Geneva on July 21-25, despite wide divergences in political positions within the areas of negotiation, and despite the fact the United States has no authority to sign any potential conclusion. Given the real tragedies of the ongoing food price crisis, lack of adequate development progress in many developing countries, crises in the financial markets, and the impending global climate catastrophe, governments must be allowed to preserve the policy space necessary to enact real solutions to these juggernaut challenges. On the basis of past experience with WTO policies, as well as current projections for minimal economic “gains” but large economic “costs” from a potential WTO Doha Round, WTO expansion is not in the economic interests of the vast majority of the world. Global concerns have shifted significantly since the Doha Round was launched, rendering it useless to face the current political demands. Fortunately, current international political dynamics have likewise shifted, giving rise to the fact that more successful alternative policies are being implemented. The Doha Round is likely to face another failure in Geneva this week.

1. The mini-Ministerial is an outrageous process maneuver – which will exclude over four-fifths of the WTO’s membership – called by Director General Pascal Lamy in a desperate attempt to conclude a deal that most countries now realize will harm them.

Only between 20 and 30 countries of the WTO’s 152-country membership have been invited to participate in the mini-Ministerial set to begin on July 21. Lamy himself decided who may attend and who is to be excluded from the negotiations, and the list of invited member countries is being held secret.ⁱ As the Director General of the WTO, and the Chair of the operative Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC), Lamy has engaged in an enormous power-grab by making decisions that will determine the future of the WTO and the Doha Round which are beyond his mandate.

In the past mini-Ministerial meetings have been highly criticized for abrogating official WTO “consensus” policy and marginalizing the vast majority of WTO members. This time, Lamy attempted to assuage excluded members’ concerns about lack of transparency and undemocratic process by also convening the TNC next week, alongside exclusive and sometimes hastily convened “Green Room” meetings where the real negotiations will occur. In addition, Lamy had promised that whatever potential agreement might result from the exclusive meetings would be taken to the General Council, set to occur July 29-30, to seek approval, in keeping with the mandate of the General Council as the decision-making body of the WTO. In a letter sent to negotiators on July 14, however, Lamy pulled a bait and switch – now setting out the process that the TNC set for Saturday July 26^th (which he chairs) will be the site for decision-making on the potential results of the exclusive mini-Ministerial, rather than the General Council.ⁱⁱ Now stating that the General Council will only “take note” of the outcome of the mini-Ministerial, Lamy has set up a procedure which vastly limits the rights of the majority of WTO members to voice their serious concerns with the recent texts, just released this past July 10^th.

These process shenanigans belie an underlying fundamental dynamic: the vast majority of WTO countries do not appear to be interested in making a deal, while only a few appear to be desperately pushing the majority towards an attempted conclusion. A quick review of the major crises facing the world, and the damage the WTO will do towards the prospects for solving them, coupled with the negative impacts of past WTO policies and poor projections for WTO gains, indicate that it is in the interests of the vast majority of countries – and the vast majority of people in all countries – to prevent the conclusion of the Round.

2. The United States has no authority to sign a potential Doha deal due to Fast Track’s 2007 expiration; any deal “initialed” would be re-negotiated by a future US president; and the Farm Bill locks in US farm subsidies beyond the key demands of developing countries,ⁱⁱⁱ for five years.

As explained on July 14, 2008 in an Op-Ed by US trade lawyer Lori Wallach in South Africa’s leading Business Daily:

“Negotiations do not normally occur unless all parties have authority to make a deal. The Bush administration has no authority to make binding commitments on trade since losing Fast Track trade authority a year ago. …

“There is zero chance that Congress will provide President Bush new Fast Track authority. The congressional leadership has explicitly stated in writing that it will not support further Fast Track for Bush.

“Further, at this juncture, U.S. positions in the Doha Round negotiations cannot be relied upon to represent what is politically viable in Congress. Bush is desperate to repair his woeful legacy by being able to announce some Doha breakthrough. Yet he is simultaneously 100 percent free of responsibility to ensure such a deal could be passed by Congress.

“Countries making concessions now, in reliance on Bush administration promises, will almost certainly face additional or different demands from a new president, who will be responsible for ensuring a deal can actually get through Congress.

“The unreliability of Bush administration representations is most obvious regarding agriculture. U.S. negotiators are making offers that directly conflict with the recent U.S. Farm Bill. … First, the new Farm Bill sets U.S. policy for the next five years. More importantly Congress’ support for the positions in this Farm Bill are so strong among Democrats and Republicans alike that Congress overrode Bush’s veto to enact the legislation by more than a two-thirds vote – twice! Yet, the Bush administration continues to dangle bait– for instance regarding subsidy levels – that it knows would be unacceptable in Congress.

“The political and legal reality is that the United States will only be in a position to engage honestly in Doha Round talks after the new president arrives. …

“Then why do countries seem to be willing to go along with this WTO ministerial? The response I have heard from other countries’ WTO negotiators is uniform: they know about the U.S. situation and the severe danger of proceeding, but no country wants to be blamed for raising it. Thus, allow me to state the obvious publicly and let the blame come back here to Washington: the emperor has no clothes!”^iv

3. The food crisis – one of the greatest human rights catastrophes of our time – could push 100 million people into extreme poverty, according to UN estimates. This crisis of epic proportions will be exacerbated, not resolved,^v by the potential conclusion of the Doha Round.

This past June, over 250 major farmer organizations, NGOs, trade unions and social movements from over 50 countries delivered a strong snub to WTO Director-General, Pascal Lamy, in his push to conclude the Doha Round as a “solution” to the global food crisis.^vi

Lamy was attending the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) High-Level Conference on food security. Groups including ActionAid International, Africa Trade Network, Asian Peasant Coalition, Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo (Latin American Coordination of Rural Movements, CLOC), Oxfam International, and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy sent a letter to Lamy as well as Trade and Agriculture Ministers saying that the answer to skyrocketing prices of basic staples “does not lie in deeper deregulation of food production and trade.”

The letter continued:

“The global food system is in crisis. Millions of people can no longer afford or access the food they need, increasing global hunger and malnutrition. The worlds’ governments need to act now. But the answer does not lie in deeper deregulation of food production and trade.

“We believe the Doha Round as is currently envisioned will further intensify the crisis by making food prices more volatile, increasing developing countries’ dependence on imports, and strengthening the power of multinational agribusiness in food and agricultural markets. Developing countries are likely to lose further policy space in their agriculture sector, which would in turn limit their ability to deal with the current crisis and to strengthen the livelihoods of small producers.

“The inability to manage the current food crisis is an illustration of the failure of three decades of market deregulation in agriculture. We need a new model for the trading system that puts development, employment and food security objectives at the centre.”

Finding real solutions to the food crisis must take precedence over a rushed effort to push through a Doha deal that would negatively impact hundreds of millions of farmers in countries worldwide.

Over the last several decades, developing countries have been pushed – often through policy conditionalities imposed by the World Bank and IMF – to reduce or eradicate supports for domestic production of food, in favor of increasing trade in food. This has led to an increased dependence on foreign markets, as two-thirds of developing countries are now net food importers. A recent leaked report by the World Bank cited a sudden switch from food production to biofuels in the US and other rich countries as responsible for three-fourths of the dramatic rise in food prices.^vii In the face of unpredictable and unregulated world markets, developing countries must have the tools at their disposal to provide for their domestic food needs to ensure food security.

A parallel issue in the Doha negotiations on agriculture relates to the developing countries’ demand for policy tools to combat dumping, or the selling of products below the cost of production – a practice which contributed to the devastation of developing country food production systems. A group of 46 countries called the G33, representing about 80% of global population, have formed an alliance to demand exemptions for certain key food products from tariff reductions, as well as the ability to increase tariffs on products that face dumping. These tools, called Special Products and Special Safeguard Mechanism, are key to ensuring food security, rural development, and farmer’s livelihood security.^viii In particular, the G33 demand that some SP’s be fully exempted from tariff cuts, and that the tools of the SSM include allowing a country to raise its tariff rates above current levels (those consolidated in the Uruguay Round). Yet the rich countries are demanding severe limitations on these flexibilities – which, if implemented, would render the policies nearly useless. The fight over SP/SSM exposes the hypocrisy of Doha as a “Development” Round, and will likely be a key “deal-breaker” issue in the negotiations this week.

4. Trade unions worldwide have raised the alarm about the anti-development impacts of a potential Doha Round conclusion, as tariff cuts demanded by rich countries would result in massive job loss in developing countries across the globe.

Along with Agriculture, one of the key areas of negotiation in the Doha Round involves the reduction of tariffs on non-agricultural manufactured goods, and natural resources, referred to as Non Agricultural Market Access or NAMA. As Europe, the United States, and other rich countries were developing, they used the key policy tool of tariffs to protect nascent industries from foreign competition. As they grew competitive, they reduced these tariffs voluntarily to promote consumer savings. These reductions occurred over the last 50 years during the seven rounds of negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the precursor to the WTO. Now these rich countries seek to pry open the markets of developing countries by pressuring them to reduce tariffs. The International Trade Union Confederation has run economic models demonstrating that the reductions demanded of the developing countries would result in severe job losses across textile, chemical, leather, wood products, electronics, automobile, and many other sectors.

A group of the developing countries that would be the hardest hit by these tariff cuts, called the “NAMA 11” countries, has fought to preserve the mandate of the negotiations that rich countries must provide more market access to developing country exports than the market access opened to them by developing countries (the principle of “less than full reciprocity”). In contrast, the actual negotiations contemplate using a so-called “Swiss formula with coefficient” resulting in tariff reductions of 30% by the rich countries, but approximately 60% by the developing countries! Given the very limited flexibilities being discussed for developing countries (far less than the flexibilities being discussed for the rich countries in agriculture), these tariff cuts would have devastating impacts on jobs, development, and future policy space to promote key strategic industries for developing countries. The most recent negotiating texts reflects many of the demands of corporate interests in the US and Europe, and does not maintain the policy space nor flexibilities demanded by the NAMA 11.

As a result, trade unions have reacted strongly against every new draft text in recent years, calling on governments to preserve the tools necessary to implement smart development policies, including the one used most extensively by rich countries on their road to development: protective tariffs. Statements developed by a coalition of trade unions fighting on the negotiations have demanded the NAMA 11 to maintain demands on respecting the principle of less than full reciprocity; for an increase in the percentages for the flexibilities without accepting a lower coefficient; for the possibility to both select tariffs lines that are exempted from tariff cuts and that are subject to half the formula cuts; and to allow for flexibilities to be changed over time. Likewise, Latin American trade unions have raised additional concerns that the tariff cuts would increase dependence on rich-country markets and undermine the overarching Latin American goal of regional integration.^ix

This issue has become a top concern of the negotiations, and could well be a deal-breaker in Geneva. Based on the text agreed to at the Hong Kong Ministerial, the level of “ambition” in NAMA (the key developed-country offensive interest) must be balanced by the level of “ambition” in agriculture (the key offensive interest to many developing countries.) However, the negotiations – including the most recent texts released on July 10 – demonstrate increasing accommodation of developed country offensive and defensive positions at the expense of the needs and positions of the poor countries.^x

5. The ongoing crisis in the financial markets calls attention to the need for increased regulation, not further liberalization and deregulation, which are key demands of developed countries in the Doha negotiations.

In a July 18, 2008 article in the Financial Times, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson reiterated claims – unsupported by evidence – that a conclusion to the Doha Round was necessary to give a confidence boost to the global economy, to help it deal with the climate, food, and energy crises.^xi In reality, the liberalizations of key service sector markets demanded by the EU and US – in particular energy and finance – would allow for further market volatility and show no indication of being able to provide stabilizing solutions.

This is far from realistic. It is well known that the lack of adequate transparency, oversight and regulation of the increasingly complex financial markets has been a major contributory factor to the financial crisis. Financial service deregulation and liberalization is a key demand of developed countries in the Doha Round. If it were to be adopted, the most recent Chair’s text on Services would expand liberalization and deregulation in many service sectors including finance.

As noted by a recent article sent to trade negotiators:

“New commitments in financial services will prevent governments from making interventions in the financial industry and on financial markets to curb speculative and destructive activities and financial products, including derivative trading in commodities and food in times of crises and rising prices.”^xii

But financial services is not the only area of concern. On July 14, 2008 a letter was sent by 73 organizations to WTO members expressing concerns about the dramatic new demands being made on developing countries in the GATS negotiations.

“It is well known that the US and the EU, supported by Japan, Canada, Australia and other industrialized countries, have been insisting that developing countries make major concessions in terms of market access in services in exchange for movement in agriculture and NAMA before the Doha Round can be concluded. Key sectors of developing country economies have been targeted for market access and national treatment including – financial services, energy services, telecom services, education services, environment services and tourism services.”^xiii

The recent Chair’s texts goes way beyond the Doha mandate, calling on countries to commit current levels of liberalization to WTO disciplines permanently, as well as for making liberalization commitments in Services a pre-requisite for achieving basic development balance in the agriculture negotiations – yet they were only included in the Doha mandate to begin with based on the promise that Services openings would be completely voluntary for developing countries.

6. The current “trade” model embodied in the WTO exacerbates the climate crisis by contributing to global warming. If concluded, the WTO expansion through Doha would further erode policy space on the national and international level to combat the climate crisis.

The WTO model of trade is making global warming worse, instead of stepping aside and allowing more space for governments to work towards real solutions. According to a new report:

“Though often overlooked, irresponsible trade practices contribute dramatically to global warming— increasing the volumes and distances of goods shipped, enabling rapid deforestation, and thwarting environmentally-friendly production requirements. Deforestation alone, much of it driven by the trade of illegally logged timber, now accounts for one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Stern report on the economics of climate change, which documents the impacts and costs of global warming.”^xiv

Current negotiations towards a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gases must have available a full range of policy options in order to find the best mix of solutions that will reduce emissions, while ensuring that those who are responsible for causing global warming are also responsible for reducing it. WTO rules should not prevent countries from using the most effective solutions.

7. The failure of the policies of the WTO “Washington consensus” economic model – including its implementation by its ideological sisters, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank – to produce real economic growth and poverty reduction have undermined support for expansion of the WTO.

When the WTO was debated worldwide in 1994, proponents promised increased rates of economic growth and poverty reduction. In developing countries that had been forced to adopt the same policy package as conditionalities for their IMF or World Bank loans, people already had decades of experience with the model’s many downsides and growth failures.

During the WTO decade, economic conditions for the majority have deteriorated. The number and percentage of people living on less than $1 a day (the World Bank definition of extreme poverty) in regions with some of the worst forms of poverty – Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East – have increased since the WTO began operating,^xv while the number and percentage of people living on less than $2 a day has increased at the same time in these regions, as well as in Latin America and the Caribbean.^xvi Growth rates in these regions have also slowed dramatically since the implementation of the neo-liberal policy package. In Latin America, from 1960 to 1980, per capita income grew by 82 percent, while from 1980 to 2000, income per person grew only 9 percent. From 2000 to 2005, income per capita has grown 4 percent.^xvii Similarly, in Africa, per capita income grew around 40 percent from 1960 to 1980 and shrank more than 10 percent from 1980 to 1998.^xviii

The number of people living in poverty has also increased in South Asia, while growth rates and the rate of reduction in poverty have slowed in most parts of the world – especially when one excludes China, where huge reductions in poverty have been accomplished, but not by following WTO-approved policies (China became a WTO member only in 2001).^xix Indeed, the economic policies that China employed to obtain its dramatic growth and poverty reduction are a veritable smorgasbord of WTO violations: high tariffs to keep out imports and significant subsidies and government intervention to promote exports; an absence of intellectual property protection; government-owned, operated and subsidized energy, transportation and manufacturing sectors; tightly regulated foreign investment with numerous performance requirements regarding domestic content and technology transfer; government-controlled finance and banking systems subsidizing billions in non-performing debt; and government-controlled, subsidized and protected agriculture. Many of these same policies are those employed by the now-wealthy countries during their period of development.

It’s not as if the WTO has increased wealth for most people in developed countries either. During the WTO era, the U.S. trade deficit has risen to historic levels – from $130 billion (in today’s dollars) in 1994 (the year before the WTO went into effect) to $700 billion in 2007. The U.S. trade deficit is close to 6 percent of national income – a figure widely agreed to be unsustainable, putting the United States and global economy at risk.^xx Soaring U.S. imports during the WTO decade have contributed to the loss of nearly one in six U.S. manufacturing jobs. U.S. real median wages have scarcely risen above their 1970 level, while productivity has soared 82 percent over the same period, resulting in declining or stagnant standards of living for the nearly 70 percent of the U.S. population that does not have a college degree.^xxi

8. Projected gains from a WTO expansion are meager, while many countries are projected to experience net losses.

Proponents of the Doha Round agenda regularly attempt to shift the debate away from the actual record of WTO performance and instead repeat endlessly the mantra that the Doha is a Development Round which represents developing countries’ best chance for reducing global poverty. The World Bank initially projected that the Round would deliver $832 billion in increased global wealth – but was criticized for using a methodology widely considered unrealistic.^xxii

More recent World Bank studies based on revised analysis found extremely limited potential gains from a “Doha Round” overall. The most likely Doha scenario the World Bank reviewed could produce benefits of only $16 billion for developing countries and $96 billion to the world by 2015, meaning the developing country share of Doha gains would be a fraction of the developed countries’ gains. These projections of gains amount to 0.14 percent of projected developing country GDPand about 0.23 percent of world GDP, respectively. Put another way, it is a little less than one cent per person per day to the developing world, or about four cents per person per day to the world as a whole.^xxiii

Worse, the new research revealed that 50 percent of the limited gains for developing countries under a scenario of total liberalization (which Doha would not have achieved) would go to only eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam. And under the “likely” Doha scenario, the Middle East, Bangladesh, Mexico, and much of Africa would actually face net losses.^xxiv

More recent studies showed that the alleged gains for Brazil and India with the Doha Round would be largely concentrated in those countries’ agribusiness and manufacturing industries, respectively. At the same time, subsistence farmers – a much larger percentage of the population in those countries – would see tiny gains or even net losses.^xxv Likewise, even gains to these two supposed “winners” in agricultural and manufacturing liberalization would be offset by increased costs from liberalization of sensitive service sectors and loss in tariff revenues.^xxvi

In addition, several of these studies are deeply flawed in that they tout “gains” while failing to take into consideration the “costs” of implementing the Doha Round. First of all, the economic models used in the studies “assume full employment.” That means they capture alleged savings on consumer food prices as gains, but fail to show a loss if millions of subsistence farmers, who represent nearly half of the developing world, lose their livelihoods. In addition, they fail to include the increased costs that consumers worldwide pay for medicines due to pharmaceutical monopolies, which some economists estimate outweigh the projected gains, even for the few developing country “winners.” And finally, the models fail to adequately take into account the loss in tariff revenue for developing countries, which the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimated would be 2 to 4 times the projected gains for developing countries from the Doha WTO expansion. These flaws have rarely been mentioned in media reports touting alleged “gains” for the poor.

The debate about the projected “gains” or “losses” from a potential Doha conclusion is important to understanding the current political dynamic because many countries reluctantly entered into WTO expansion talks at Doha in 2001 only after being promised a “development” round aimed at rectifying imbalances in the Uruguay Round. That “development” round has failed to materialize.

9. International political dynamics have shifted, giving rise to the fact that more successful alternative policies are being implemented.

The current globalization model implemented by the WTO is also being challenged increasingly by large numbers of economists and legislators, and civil society worldwide, based on the evidence of the model’s poor performance in achieving its alleged goals. This reality has generated significant political backlash in numerous countries against the model of the WTO. Likewise, developing countries are experimenting with innovative policies that are delivering far more growth, and putting an increased value on resource nationalization and regional integration, both of which are resulting in economic gains far greater than those projected for developing countries from Doha.

The rejection of the neo-liberal model implemented by the WTO has been especially prevalent throughout Latin America, where recent years have seen a wave of elections ushering in leaders who have made rejection of this agenda a staple of their platforms. In 2002, Argentina elected President Néstor Kirchner, who ran on an anti-neoliberal platform. Since then, Argentina has enjoyed the highest level of growth in Latin America, bringing 10 million people over the poverty line. His wife, Christina Fernandez, was elected last year on the basis of continuing his economic expansion. In 1998, the people of Venezuela elected Hugo Chávez to the presidency in a rejection of his predecessors’ commitment to the neo-liberal agenda. Venezuela has enjoyed the second-highest growth rate in the hemisphere in the last five years, and has cut poverty in half.

In 2003, Bolivia’s then-President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was forced to resign and flee the country, primarily to his continuance of neo-liberal policies implemented there over the last 20 years, which have resulted in a lower per capita GDP today in Bolivia than 27 years ago and two-thirds of the population living below the poverty line.^xxvii Bolivia’s new President, Evo Morales, was elected in 2006 on a platform of opposition to this flawed globalization model. As a result of Morales’ re-nationalization of hydrocarbons, Bolivian national revenues from oil and gas have increased from $300 million to over $1.5 billion, providing essential revenues for South America’s poorest nation.

In other countries such as Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, and most recently, Paraguay, candidates favoring alternative policies beat out “neoliberal” proponents with the victories of Luis Ignacio “Lula” da Silva, Tabaré Vazquez, US-trained economist Rafael Correa, and pro-poor former bishop, Fernando Lugo, respectively. In the last few years, conomic growth in Latin America has been increasingly rapidly for the first time since 1980.

In several other countries, elections have been dominated by debates over trade liberalization, such as in Costa Rica, where fair traders nearly defeated a referendum on the Central America-US Free Trade Agreement, a defeat many ascribe to intervention in that country’s electoral process by the Bush administration. Likewise, Mexico’s presidential elections in 2006 were dominated by a debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with Andrés Manuel López Obrador -- who pushed repeatedly during his campaign for a renegotiation of NAFTA -- being narrowly defeated by ruling party candidate Felipe Calderón in an election marred by substantial allegations of irregularities.

Finally, the re-nationalization of utilities and natural resources taking place around the globe is also indicative of this rejection of the WTO model. In the last eight years, several cities in Bolivia have rejected private water contracts held by foreign companies. Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico have also seen recent protests against privatization of essential services. Re-nationalization of key sectors has produced impressive results in some of the cases where it’s recently been tried. After the Bolivian government re-nationalized its hydrocarbons sector in 2006, total revenues for the combined public sector increased to 40.2 percent of GDP (from 27.5 percent in 2004), with most of this increase due to the government’s policies in the hydrocarbons sector. Increases in natural gas prices have made these changes even more important. And in the five years following the re-nationalization of oil in Venezuela, real (inflation-adjusted) GDP has grown by more than 87 percent, with only a small part of this growth being in oil. The unemployment and poverty rates have been cut in half and real (inflation-adjusted) social spending per person has increased by more than 300 percent.^xxviii

Looked at together, the trend is clear: Latin American electorates are systematically rejecting the “trade liberalization” model of the WTO. There is increasing consensus that the rejection is based on the clear failure of the model to deliver economic growth, and that alternative policies and regional integration are providing more opportunities for growth and development.

The election of leaders seeking alternatives to the failed trade policies of the past, the failure of the United States to systematically expand the WTO/NAFTA model, and the massive social movements against service privatization and in favor of resource nationalization and regional integration are clear signs of a broad scale rejection of the current model of corporate globalization based on the experience of its failure, and a successful, though nascent, search for more successful development paradigms.

10. The Doha Round is likely to face another failure in Geneva this week. The world’s energies must not, however, shift towards further negotiations of the same trade model on a bilateral or regional basis. Instead, a new model of governing multilateral trade must be developed, in the context of the current global priorities of ensuring food security, promoting global economic growth and stability, and halting global warming.

The likely failure of Lamy’s attempts to push through a Doha Round will be a great victory for social movements around the world who have campaigned for this outcome, as well as for people globally.

The evidence points conclusively to a global shift away from the neo-liberal trade model embodied by the WTO based on people’s experience of the model’s failure. With the Doha Round’s collapse, policy space desperately needed to tackle the real challenges facing the world will be preserved.

However, the “moral” of a Doha failure should not be to blame individual countries, nor to shift focus towards negotiating the same (and sometimes more extreme) set of policies through bilateral and regional negotiations, as the United States, the EU, Canada, Japan and Australia are pushing with nearly all developing countries. Instead, the focus should be on how the world’s governments can develop a more democratic multilateral trade system that takes advantage of the benefits of trade for growth and development, while ensuring that international agreements and negotiations on agriculture, energy, climate, human rights, and labor rights enjoy primacy over trade.

Over two hundred civil society organizations, including social movements representing millions of people in poor and rich countries alike, support a WTO transformation program called “Stop Corporate Globalization: Another World is Possible.” Just as importantly, emphasis and political capital must be utilized to solve the truly global crises of food prices, economic instability and climate change.

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