Inter Press Service | April 12, 2002 | Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA - Top officials from the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rejected the analysis published Thursday by the humanitarian organization Oxfam International about the inequities of the global trade system and the harm it purportedly causes developing countries.
The report, part of Oxfam's "Make Trade Fair" campaign, blames WTO rules for relegating the world's poor regions and countries to misery, but at least one other humanitarian group says the report does not go far enough, and charges that it "contradicts Oxfam's own stated mission."
Penny Fowler, Oxfam trade policy adviser and co-author of the report, said Thursday that the global trade system "is full of rigged rules and double standards that benefit rich countries and transnational corporations at the expense of poor."
But WTO Director-General Mike Moore was quick to refute the 274-page study, stating that it suffers from "omissions and errors."
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan shared the diagnosis outlined by Oxfam to the extent that it mentions the distortions of the current international trade regime.
However, Annan disagreed with the humanitarian group's criticisms about the outlook for the new round of multilateral trade negotiations that was launched following the WTO ministerial conference last November in Doha, Qatar.
Oxfam maintains that at the Doha conference, the governments of the wealthy countries proved their inability to learn from their own mistakes.
Although the industrialized world made a commitment to the new round of trade talks that are ostensibly focused on development, "it is business as usual," according to the Britain-based non-governmental organization (NGO).
The vague commitments made at Doha to improve developing countries' access to markets has not translated into strategy leading to real changes, says Oxfam. The already questionable credibility of the multilateral system is reaching the breaking point, it warns.
That vision contrasts with the optimism of the UN secretary-general, who said the negotiation program already under way at the WTO "holds great promise."
Annan says this is an opportunity that "must not be missed" to address the special needs of developing countries and "to build a fair, rules-based and predictable multilateral trading system."
His comments were read by a UN official during the presentation of the Oxfam report in Geneva.
The Oxfam document, titled "Rigged Rules, Double Standards: Trade, Globalisation and the Fight against Poverty", serves as the basis for the organization's "Make Trade Fair" campaign, to last the next three years, coinciding with the period of the WTO's main trade negotiations.
Oxfam proposes to "make a big noise" around the world to support the campaign aimed at changing the rules of the multilateral system in order to free up "the power of world trade to reduce poverty."
The NGO states that it is in favor of trade, but that increased trade in and of itself does not automatically lift people out of poverty, and current rules "are rigged in favor of the rich."
But when trade is accompanied by effective economic policies and policy-reduction strategies, it can act as a powerful motor for change.
The focus of the Oxfam campaign has come under fire from the Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First, an organization based in the U.S. city of Oakland.
Food First co-director Anuradha Mittal interprets the Oxfam approach as being based on a "call for increased trade liberalization, which many developing countries' governments and civil society oppose."
Mittal interpreted the Oxfam report as "making the case that more globalization is what the developing countries need - echoing the position of United States Trade Representative (USTR), the European Union (EU), and WTO."
Food First is disappointed that Oxfam, one of the leading NGOs in efforts to improve food security, "has chosen to undermine the demands of social movements and think tanks in the developing South" that seek to put an end to poverty through a global citizens' movement for economic and social justice.
Some of the groups Mittal listed were Via Campesina, Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST), Third World Network, Focus on the Global South, and Africa Trade Network.
From the contrasting perspective, the WTO director general criticized Oxfam for failing to mention that the trade organization "has undertaken a variety of measures to assist developing countries."
Moore said he was "surprised that Oxfam's officials seemingly ignored the fact that the WTO has substantially increased the funding available for technical assistance" for developing countries.
In its report, Oxfam states that many of the WTO's rules, such as those governing intellectual property rights, "protect the interests of rich countries and powerful transnational corporations while imposing huge costs on developing countries."
The document also questions the trade and finance policies championed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, and calls on the two institutions to step pressing poor countries into opening their markets "at break-neck speed."
In response to the presentation of the report Thursday, Brazilian (news - web sites) ambassador to the WTO, Luiz Felipe de Seixas Correa, said, "We look forward to the contribution Oxfam can make to create conditions for trade to effectively become an engine for poverty reduction and development as we begin negotiations under a new WTO trade round."
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