By: By MARTIN WALKER | United Press International
DOHA, Qatar, Nov. 11 The most important battlefront in the war on terrorism could be a long way from Afghanistan, by the shimmering waters and under the burning sun of the Persian Gulf, where negotiators from 142 countries are trying to hammer out a new deal on world trade.
On the surface, the grinding talks on patents for new medicines and quotas for textiles at the World Trade Organization summit may not seem to have much to do with the bombing campaign against Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
In reality, the real fate of the war on terrorism may hinge on the ability of the wealthy United States and its European and Japanese allies to convince the rest of the world that free markets and free trade can work for them too.
Take the example of Pakistan. Two thirds of its export earnings come from textiles. The United States and Europe have assembled a complex mix of import quotas and tariffs against Pakistan (and other developing countries) to protect their own textile industries. But Pakistan, a crucial front-line ally in the war on terrorism, is in dire economic straits. The fastest and most effective way to help, beyond the debt relief already pledged by the United States, is to let Pakistan profit from what it does best -- using its low-wage structure to sell cheap textiles. Last month, the 15-nation European Union agreed to lift most of its restrictions on Pakistani textiles, in what looks like being a $3 billion boost for the embattled regime of President Pervez Musharraf. The Bush administration in the U.S. is nerving itself to follow suit, despite the inevitable battle with protectionist Congressmen and Senators like Jesse Helms, whose North Carolina constituents have already lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the te xtile industry.
The world trade system has been an extraordinary success. The growth of world trade has gone hand in hand with widening prosperity among rich countries, and those developing countries like South Korea and Taiwan and China that have crafted their export industries to profit from the widening global market. One of the high points of the current WTO summit will be the formal welcome of China and Taiwan into the organization, as the 143rd and 144th members.
But much of the world, in Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America, argue that the trade rules -- like the ones blocking Pakistani textiles -- seem designed to stop them from climbing up the prosperity ladder. They claim they cannot even afford to carry out the basic reforms of the building blocks of prosperity like Customs procedures and state statistical services that are already required by WTO rules. They have trouble even financing the diplomats and trade experts they need to send to WTO meetings like the current summit.
The world's poorest countries want trade rather than aid. But there is an element of hypocrisy in the way the rich countries run the world trade system that infuriates the poor ones. In 1994, when the Uruguay Round of world trade talks was finally agreed and the WTO established, solemn promises were made to phase out agricultural subsidies in rich countries. In fact, agricultural subsidies in the U.S., Japan and Europe, likely to high $300 billion this year, are higher now than they were seven years ago.
This kind of hypocrisy, or the anguish of AIDS-devastated African countries who cannot pay the high prices for patent-protected drugs, or the way the world's poorest countries now pay far more in interest on their debt than they get in aid, has fueled the anti-globalization movement around the world. It has very nearly turned what should be a win-win trade relationship for all countries into a polarization between the rich and the poor ones.
Trade lies at the heart of a constellation of resentments against the United States, against the West in general and against the global economic system, the culture and the civilization they have built. Unless the world trade system becomes visibly fairer and starts bringing the poorer countries into the West's virtuous circle of more trade and more prosperity, those resentments are likely to sour into something else far more threatening.
Walden Bello, director of Focus on the Global South, chilled a recent conference in Budapest when he argued that for many people in the developing world, anti-globalization and anti-Americanism were very nearly the same thing. "In the Third World, you saw a real ambivalence about the September 11 act," he said. "Across Asia, one of the biggest-selling items has been Osama bin Laden T-shirts. He is now emerging as a rebel figure running circles round a bully."
When President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair argue that Osama bin Laden is at war with the civilized world, they beg the question whether the Western-dominated world looks all that civilized to its poorer and developing members.
The challenge of this WTO summit will be to show -- in the teeth of a gathering recession -- that trade can be both free and fair, and that the poorest countries whose people feel a sneaking admiration for bin Laden's anti-American defiance have a stake in making world trade work. That's why the negotiating tussles at Doha may be more important for the war on terrorism than the battle in Afghanistan. Content: 11002000 11014000By: By MARTIN WALKER:
