Houston Chronicle | By DUDLEY ALTHAUS | September 13, 2003
CANCUN, Mexico -- Protesters wilted in the tropical swelter Saturday but tempers flared inside meeting halls at this Mexican beach resort, where delegates from 148 countries are trying to iron out proposals for a global opening of agricultural and other markets.
Led by scores of South Koreans, about 3,000 protesters tore down a section of a wire and metal police barricade, stepped inside, and sat down. A phalanx of police assured that they would go no farther than the barricades, which stand five miles from the meetings.
Inside the negotiating rooms, a draft of the declaration members of the World Trade Organization are expected to sign today raised the ire of many attending the talks.
Although the document calls for sharp reductions in export subsidies for agricultural goods, it fails to set any specific deadlines for doing so or to specify by how much tariffs in Europe, the United States and Japan will be reduced.
Angry delegates from poor countries, who have pushed for an opening of developed countries' markets and an end to the subsidies, quickly accused the United States and European governments of trying to roll back promises of dramatic cuts in farm subsidies and tariffs on imported food.
"Our concerns didn't meet any satisfaction," said Hegel Goutier, a Haitian negotiator speaking for a 61-country coalition of some of the world's poorest countries. "This text is very far from our position."
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick issued a brief statement urging calm and suggesting that the draft circulating Saturday would undergo revisions. "Now comes the crucial give and take toward a final document," he said.
If successful, the talks here will set a framework for negotiations leading to a worldwide agreement on the reduction in tariffs, subsidies and other trade-distorting measures by early 2005. These talks are part of the so-called Doha round of negotiations, which began in November 2001. They are touted as focusing on the needs of developing countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia.
However, delegates of many of those developing countries have accused the U.S., European and Japanese governments -- collectively called the West by some -- of trying to backtrack on earlier promises for their own benefit.
They accused their U.S. and European counterparts Saturday of trying to run roughshod over the process by agreeing to vague outlines for negotiating an end to farm protections without setting any specific timetable or reductions.
Many of the advocacy groups focused on world poverty that are closely watching the talks agree with that assessment.
"The European Union and the United States are trying to rewrite the Doha agenda," said Sam Barratt, a spokesman for Oxfam, the British aid group which is pushing hard for an end to U.S. and European farm subsidies and protection. "They are just not listening to what's happening in Cancun."
Critics charged that the proposal, as published Saturday, does little or nothing to end the heavily subsidized U.S. and European grain and other agricultural goods on world markets. Developing countries' governments and private development groups argue that such practices are bankrupting the world's poorest farmers by the millions in favor of corporate agriculture.
"What we're seeing is more of the same failed approach to trade -- where the U.S. and European Union get to continue dumping agricultural products onto the world market," said Mark Ritchie, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.
"This will simply intensify the global commodity crisis that is crushing farmers around the world."Houston Chronicle:
