Chowdhury K.A. News
It was notable from the onset that the outcome of the fourth WTO Ministerial will be a controlled and well-orchestrated one. Within FoEI and the wider NGO/civil society coalition, it was taken for granted. But still we never allowed ourselves to be taken aback irrespective of an outcome we knew would not go entirely our way. All of us have relentlessly put in the effort to get our message across and see some of our concerns acknowledged, included, and be given a place within the WTO rule-making process. We must admit that we have gained good territory.
It is ripe time, however, to think about certain things that we might not have attended to. In the 10th November EC NGO briefing, an EC delegate commented and implied that WTO is not a development organization, and that through S&D only participation for LDCs is guaranteed; it must not be seen as a provision that explicitly serves the development need for LDCs. Another comment to note is the one that came from the EC Agritrade Commissioner in a similar briefing after 10th November. He said that 'Trade, and Aid' should replace the popular development slogan 'Trade, not Aid'. He reasoned that trade is not the answer to all the development needs of LDCs.
There is almost an unavoidable opportunity for issue spotting in these comments. Given a closer look, we would know why. To start with the first, one can easily reason that the LDCs had been lured into the WTO with the promise of development. They are made irreversible adherents of the comparative advantage theory, and to such an extreme that it poses obstacles for them to diversify their export sector [or drive their production capacities and/or resources inward to cater to their own needs, say achieving food security] when faced with economic uncertainty. One might not admit, but the need for self determinism still exists in terms of gaining complete economic freedom from the current economic model driven by the dominant political will. And it is common knowledge that basic economic principles, the rules of law are predicated to political will. If one wants to rationalize, one can put that the official was only trying to screen out the normative/value-judgmental aspects from the WTO rule-making process, which is of course a legal one than a moral one; deception is the mode of operation. We must remember, however, that the line of work pursued by public-interest NGOs/civil societies, like ours, have more of a moral dimension. And the entire issue of economic development is normative/value-judgmental. The comments/statements were grossly unjust/offensive, therefore.
The second comment has huge amount of significance at least in terms of how the dominant political will wants to carry on making false promises and concurrently guarantee the inequitable flow of wealth from the impoverished south to the north. We saw ourselves how ODAs had been progressively replaced by the FDIs, and to the extent LDC governments rallied behind the concept. The last decade saw huge amount of enthusiasm propagated by the dominant political elites in the direction of trade as the sole answer to the development needs of the LDCs. If the true, unregulated, self-determined paths to export-led development were allowed [following purely the economic models germane to free trade] we would have seen LDCs emerging as developed ones. The LDCs opened up their markets progressively and to point where whatever blocks remained to free trade can be considered insignificant. Public sector development and spending had been on the decrease from the onset of the past decade. We had been fighting for unconditional market access for the LDCs as a result of our belief in the 'Trade, not Aid' slogan. We know that the issue of aid is a complicated one, but it is also widely acknowledged that aid provided by rich donors had been aggressively strategic, i.e. in many a times the aid have gone into projects or sectors that do not relate directly to the development of that particular country. Those aids have contributed to sustained elitist rule [and assurance with regards to the maintenance of dreadful and deteriorating status quo of the commons] in the LDCs and underdevelopment. 'Trade, and Aid' slogan chills the sense of hope LDCs had of escaping the debt-based world economy and legitimizes their fear of not having received any tangible benefits through economic liberalization for their commons. The comment therefore serves to rationalize why is it impossible to trust WTO [along with IMF, WB] to serve the needs of the economically marginalized.:
