WTO summit ends in failure Saturday, December 4, 1999
By MICHAEL PAULSON Mail Author and ROBERT McCLURE SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS
The world's trade ministers last night abandoned their effort to launch a new round of global trade negotiations, bringing an ugly conclusion to an ugly week.
The meeting of the World Trade Organization, hampered throughout the week by sometimes violent protests, broke up just before 10 p.m. when delegates from 135 nations said they could not agree on an agenda for future trade talks.
"Essentially, they just could not get the work done," said WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell.
The defeat for the trade ministers was a major blow to President Clinton, who had said success in Seattle required the launch of a new round of global trade talks. It was also a blow to the U.S. business community, which wants greater access to foreign markets.
U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky attempted to put the best face on defeat, saying trade ministers will attempt at some later date to pick up where they left off.
photo An exhausted Charlene Barshefsky, the U.S. trade representative, joins WTO Director-General Michael Moore, left, to announce the suspension of the Seattle round of talks. Grant M. Haller/P-I
"It would be best to take a time out, consult with one another and find a creative means to finish the job," she said.
WTO Director-General Mike Moore described the Seattle meeting as "a remarkable meeting. Much was done. That will not be lost."
And then in remarks that provoked derisive laughter from delegates, some of whom had been mauled on Tuesday trying to get into the convention center, he said: "This city, what a magnificent place. If only the world could be like Seattle."
WTO critics, who had marched in the streets seeking to stop the WTO's push toward ever-expanding global trade, were delighted.
Outside the King County Jail, hundreds of protesters cheered and banged on drums when they learned talks had collapsed.
Across town, they danced in front of the hotel where Clinton stayed earlier in the week.
"The allegedly unstoppable force of globalization just hit the immovable object called grass-roots democracy," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.
Environmentalists also were elated.
"I'm very happy," said Andrea Durbin of Friends of the Earth. "It's very clear that the governments couldn't agree because of the lack of openness, and it's clear that the WTO is never going to be the same again."
U.S. labor unions also proclaimed victory. Earlier in the day, the WTO had been poised to reject everything sought by organized labor.
"They can't go home and forget this," said David Smith, the director of public policy for the AFL-CIO. "This is a turning point in the debate."
Inside the convention center, however, some officials downplayed the role of the protesters in killing the talks.
Rockwell said the talks failed because the WTO, with 135 countries trying to operate by consensus, proved too unwieldy. He also said the topics discussed in Seattle were too complex to be resolved in a week, and he said that Third World nations "became furious" because they were not involved in enough of the negotiations.
"The idea that we can just sweep into some town somewhere on the planet and pull together a document in four days is probably an antiquated notion," said Bill Bryant, a Seattle international trade consultant. "You have an organization that is run by 135 countries . . . If this were run by corporate elites, the trains would have run on time."
Ultimately, the talks were sunk by the ire of delegates from the developing world, who have repeatedly complained that they were not benefiting from globalization. The United States and Europe offered preferential trade treatment to those nations, but that was apparently not enough to soothe delegates from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
But the delegates said that the protests and resulting disorganization set them back two days. They never recovered.
"It started off on the wrong foot and we scrambled to get into gear," said Kobsak Chutikul, director-general for economic affairs in Thailand. "We couldn't get the big picture together."
The collapse of the talks does not mean that the move toward globalization ends; trade officials will gather at WTO headquarters in Geneva next year and continue to talk about reducing barriers to trade in agriculture and services. But there is now no guarantee anything will get done because the delegates could not set specific deadlines by which they would agree to a specific agenda, such as the elimination of agricultural subsidies.
Barshefsky asked for negotiators to resume their talks at an unnamed time and place, and Anthony Gooch, a negotiator for the European Union, said there was no date set for resuming negotiations.
"We tried to build bridges, but it was too far," Gooch said.
Plans for any resumption of the new round of trade talks were completely up in the air. And there is no broad, agreed-upon pact that would outline what areas of the world economy should be liberalized next.
"I don't know if there is a chance of restarting the negotiations in weeks or even in months," said Gregor Kreuzhaber, a spokesman for the European Union.
Smaller and poorer countries have long felt slighted in the WTO, where they say they are pushed around by bigger, stronger countries. Many Third World countries view with suspicion initiatives advanced by developed countries, and this week they complained that they were being excluded from important meetings.
Third World countries found themselves disadvantaged as wealthy countries with huge delegations were able to send people to a variety of meetings at all times of the day. Japan had 88 negotiators in Seattle; the United States 85 and the Europeans 76. By contrast, Belize, Burkina Faso and the Congo each had five, while Dominica could afford only four.
"The Third World countries are reeling," said Victoria Corpuz of Third World Network, a Malaysia-based group working to protect indigenous tribes.
Early yesterday, at a meeting of all delegations, representatives of African countries reportedly booed Barshefsky. Then in the late afternoon, delegations from Africa, Latin America and Asia joined to begin drafting a statement saying they would not agree to the new round of trade talks, which would throw the launching of the round into jeopardy.
A joint communique of the Latin American and Caribbean countries on Thursday attacked "a process of limited and reserved participation by some members."
Negotiators attempted last night to salvage the talks by agreeing on a very vague description of what the new round of talks would include -- which trade negotiators would term a failure -- or by staying late to satisfy the Third World delegations.
"Maybe it's better to have it more vague, because that opens up the door for more reviews of these agreements, which is what we want," said Corpuz of Third World Network.
The week got off to a tumultuous start as tens of thousands of protesters, upset about the WTO's impact on labor, environmental and consumer issues, stormed the streets. Some of the protests turned violent, and police responded with tear gas and rubber pellets.
A security scare on Monday forced a delay of the WTO's first-ever full-scale meeting with critics from non-governmental organizations. On Tuesday, protesters blocked access to the Paramount, forcing cancellation of formal opening ceremonies, and to the convention center, causing a delay in the start of negotiations.
Protests continued throughout the week, but tougher police action, assistance from the National Guard and the imposition of a downtown curfew meant that delegates were largely unaffected by the ongoing guerrilla theater. Yesterday marked the first protests inside the convention center, when on two occasions accredited non-governmental officials unfurled smuggled banners and shouted slogans inside the building before being collared by police.
The policy debate, always difficult in an organization with as diverse a membership as the WTO, was protracted and unpleasant. The United States attacked European and Japanese farm subsidies, Japan attacked U.S. steel-protection measures, and the developing world complained that it was not gaining any benefits no matter what the WTO did.
President Clinton, who spent about 30 hours in town on Tuesday and Wednesday, threw a further wrench into the works when, on the eve of his arrival, he told the Post-Intelligencer that he wanted a proposed WTO working group on trade and labor to develop labor standards that would eventually be enforceable by trade sanctions. That comment, although welcomed by labor groups, irritated developing nations concerned that they would suffer as a result, and Clinton's labor agenda was sunk.
Clinton yesterday intervened personally to try to rescue the U.S. agenda, telephoning foreign leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi and European Union President Romano Prodi.
The administration was facing another defeat as the WTO was poised to review the U.S. use of anti-dumping laws, which punish countries for selling products here below cost. The United States has aggressively used the laws to defend politically powerful industries such as steel, and had been adamant that it would not agree even to talk about the subject at the WTO.
And the United States was losing another fight over opening the WTO itself to greater public scrutiny by opening tribunals to the public, and by allowing environmental, labor and other groups to file "friend of the court" briefs. But the U.S. effort won little support, in part because many smaller countries fear that allowing participation by non-governmental organizations, which often are based in industrialized countries, would further bias the WTO toward the interests of wealthy countries.
Dan Seligman of the Sierra Club acknowledged that there was little to celebrate. Still, Seligman was comforted by the high turnout at anti-WTO demonstrations.
"Regardless of what happens to the negotiations, we achieved our objectives beyond our wildest expectations," Seligman said.
"The average American simply didn't know the WTO existed on Monday. Just five days later, the average American has now heard of the WTO, and they know that it makes some people angry -- some of whom look like they do, and some of whom they saw on TV carrying American flags."
Ritchie and Seligman both predicted that the protests and the attention the WTO got in Seattle will eventually force the organization to reform.
"I think the WTO has changed forever," Ritchie said.
P-I reporters Angela Galloway, Rob Gavin, Paul Nyhan, Bruce Ramsey and Dan Richman contributed to this report.:
