Washington Post | By Kevin Sullivan | Sept. 10, 2003
CANCUN, Mexico, Sept. 9 -- Trade officials from 146 countries -- along with rock stars, a flotilla of warships offshore and demonstrators -- have gathered at this beach resort for a five-day round of global trade negotiations that could shape the future for farmers from Iowa to Burkina Faso.
"Failure is not an option," said Supachai Panitchpakdi, director general of the World Trade Organization, whose formal meetings were to begin here on Wednesday. "It would send a very damaging signal around the world about prospects for economic recovery and would result in more hardship for workers around the globe."
Officials from the WTO's member nations, which range from the world's richest countries to nations barely able to feed themselves, are here to continue discussions on an agenda of trade reforms begun at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, in 2001.
While the agenda covers a broad range of trade issues, agriculture has become the centerpiece of the negotiations. Nations as divergent as Brazil and Australia complain that the richest nations, chiefly the United States and members of the European Union, unfairly help their farmers with more than $300 billion a year in government subsidies.
They say those subsidies result in huge excesses of artificially low-priced fruits, vegetables and grains being dumped on world markets, making it impossible for farmers in poorer nations to compete. Critics say this costs millions of jobs and threatens traditional ways of life, particularly in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia.
"We don't see corn as merchandise," said Aldo Gonzales, a farmer from the poor Mexican state of Oaxaca, who came to Cancun to protest. "We are not self-sufficient anymore. Every day farmers are planting less, and every day more people . . . go to the United States."
Security was extremely tight today, with police and guards on nearly every corner and an eight-foot-high fence erected around the convention center where officials are meeting. With concerns about the possibility of a terrorist attack, Mexican warships bobbed in the turquoise waters off shore and thousands of anti-globalization protesters were kept behind barricades far from the meeting site.
The U.S. trade representative, Robert B. Zoellick, said Washington was looking for "ambitious results" this week. He said the United States and Europe come to the talks willing to discuss "sizable cuts" in subsidies, provided other nations agree to U.S. demands that they lower tariffs and allow freer access to their markets for U.S. manufactured goods. The White House said President Bush made telephone calls today to lobby the leaders of Brazil, Pakistan, South Africa and India -- nations that are aggressively pressing the United States to cut subsidies.
The U.S. position has been met with broad skepticism by other nations and by thousands of demonstrators, some of whom paraded naked today. Many said it was difficult to reconcile Zoellick's willingness to cut subsidies with Bush's signature last year of legislation that would increase U.S. farm subsidies by $180 billion over the next 10 years.
"For humanity's sake, these subsidies must be phased out as fast as possible," U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said, according to a statement released by the British group Oxfam. Annan's comments were appended to a petition signed by more than 3.5 million people around the world calling on the WTO to adopt policies that are fairer to developing nations.
The petition was delivered by Chris Martin of the British rock band Coldplay, who has been an outspoken advocate of Oxfam's "Make Trade Fair" campaign. "What's at stake is the future of millions of people's lives, mainly in poor countries," Martin said in an interview. He said it would be tough to persuade the Bush administration to take on the U.S. agriculture lobby. "But we have to keep trying," he said. "I'd love to have 10 minutes with him, to have a game of Ping-Pong and talk about the world. But I think we'll have to sell a lot more records to do that."Washington Post:
