Sophia Murphy, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
December 1, 2001

As ever with a large inter-governmental gathering, the fourth World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference closed in Doha, a day late, leaving the few thousand participants each with a slightly different version of what had happened. In a confusing final session, qualifications were made orally to the draft text adopted, leaving ample room for subsequent disagreement on the nature of the final outcome. Nonetheless, governments did adopt a work plan for the organization, and an agenda for their international trade negotiations.

The Ministerial Conference is the WTO’s highest decision-making body. It provides political guidance to the WTO, setting overall objectives for the organization, while the General Council in Geneva oversees the WTO’s day to day work. There is, however, a second function performed by the Ministerial Conference. Not only does it give the WTO a sense of direction, but it also provides an opportunity for other institutions, including national parliaments, as well as the public, to consider what role the WTO should play in determining multilateral economic policy. In other words, the conference is important not only to the WTO’s internal functioning, but also is an essential chance for member countries to put the WTO’s work into context in the larger world.

In Doha, member states adopted a Declaration that launches a new round of trade negotiations. Member states also adopted a declaration on Trade Related Property Rights (TRIPs) and health, and made a little progress on a few of the outstanding implementation problems that have plagued the Uruguay Round Agreements. Finally, China and Taiwan were both formally accepted as the newest WTO members.

Perhaps any WTO Ministerial after the tumult of Seattle in 1999 would seem comparatively quiet and focused. Participation by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was effectively contained by the choice of venue and extremely tight security measures. The WTO ran an accreditation process that closed early and limited organizations to a single representative from each NGO, with no access for the general public. As a consequence, there were no street demonstrations, nor were there many side events, such as seminars, teach-ins, or panel discussions. Governmental participation was also limited, at first simply by the dearth of hotel space in Doha, then by the events of September 11 and the subsequent bombing of Afghanistan. The United States delegation numbered only around 50, a third of the originally envisaged 150 and a small fraction of the number that went to Seattle, where the WTO held its third Ministerial Conference. Fewer than a dozen US-based NGOs attended, alongside only a handful of business representatives.

In many respects, considered from the point of view of developing countries, the meeting was a failure. Most developing countries did not want to launch a new trade round, but the Doha Declaration does this, committing governments to tie together a half-dozen different negotiations so that agreement on one will require agreement on all. Developing countries also hoped to rectify problems with the implementation of existing WTO agreements, but developed countries refused to make meaningful concessions. Developing countries hoped that the WTO would adopt a new, more consultative approach to developing draft text that would result in documents that would better reflect their priorities. Unfortunately, this did not happen; the views and concerns of developed countries continued to dominate the process.

The decision to launch a new round flew in the face of many developing countries’ desire to put priority on correcting problems in existing agreements and to focus on the already-mandated negotiations. All the negotiations foreseen in the draft Doha Declaration are linked to a single undertaking, overseen not by the General Council, but by a new trade negotiating committee. Although the agreements on agriculture, services and aspects of TRIPs already have built-in commitments to new negotiations, the Doha Declaration ties these together with other controversial topics, including investment, competition, environment, industrial tariffs, government procurement, and trade facilitation.

Many developing countries complained that their positions were not properly reflected in the language of the draft negotiating text taken to Doha. (This text was known as the Harbinson text, after the Ambassador from Hong Kong who chaired the General Council this year and led the preparations for Doha.) Developing countries had many concerns with the drafting of this text. The text deliberately eschewed the brackets usually used to indicate disagreement among governments. Instead, the text was presented as a carefully balanced compromise among different government positions. As analysis by the South Centre and other observers showed, however, the "balance" in the text reflected the various concerns of developed members far more than it did those of developing countries. This imbalance between the interests of developing and developed countries worsened rather than improved between the first and second Harbinson draft texts.

In agriculture, the EU managed to extract its usual pound of negotiating flesh for a highly ambiguous commitment to reduce, maybe eventually eliminate, the use of export subsidies in agriculture. In a prolonged moment of high drama, the French asserted the impossibility of reform and managed to drag out the negotiations into 24 hours of overtime. The price of the EU’s watered-down commitment was both agreement for the inclusion of negotiations on environmental concerns and the inclusion of strong language talking about negotiations on the Singapore issues (competition, investment, procurement, facilitation) sometime after the next Ministerial Conference, due in 2003. This language was somewhat negated by comments from the Chair of the Ministerial at the very end of the session that stated that it would take "explicit consensus before negotiations" on these issues could take place. This implies that if any one country does not agree then the issues cannot be negotiated in the WTO.

Despite these failures for developing countries, there were nevertheless some important signs of progress. In one crucial respect--the growing assertiveness of developing countries--the meeting should be seen as a qualified success. This success is particularly evident when the Doha Conference is compared to the 1999 Seattle Conference. Developing countries had worked hard to prepare for Seattle and were willing to engage with the system, but the system ignored their concerns. The result was a revolt by the developing countries and a collapse of the Conference as a whole.

Progress since then on the continuing negotiations in agriculture, services, and TRIPs, as well as discussions on environment, and other crucial issues has been virtually nonexistent. However, developing countries have put the time to good use. They have refined their positions and focused on their negotiating strategies. By using their regional associations, such as the Africa Group, the Caribbean’s CARICOM and ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations), they have been able to exercise more influence on the nature and content of negotiations. They have also worked across regional boundaries, as in, for instance, the so-called Like Minded Group, which includes some eighteen developing countries from Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Developing countries do not form a group with identical interests. Nor do they have the clout of the EU or the US. Nonetheless, they were able to make an impact on the process and the outcome in Doha. While the final Doha Declaration continues to show how much more powerful the developed countries are, it also showed that the balance of power has shifted, just a little.

One concrete instance of this shift in the balance of power could be observed in the Declaration on TRIPs and Health. This Declaration had come to Doha in two versions: the first floated by the United States, Switzerland, Canada, and a few other developed countries, the second by some developing countries. Prodded by pharmaceutical companies, the US and others invested in a bid to protect a restrictive reading of TRIPs, which would have protected patent laws at the expense of public policy priorities, such as access to affordable medicines. Developing countries, on the other hand, made the case for a generous interpretation of TRIPs (a notoriously ambiguous agreement) by asserting the primacy of human health and other public policy concerns over the interests of private companies. While the final Declaration fell short of what many developing countries (and civil society groups) had hoped for, the Declaration that was adopted was a modified version of the developing countries’ proposal, rather than a version of the US proposal. Although not legally binding, the Declaration strengthens the case for putting human health ahead of corporate wealth.

Another glimmer of hope can be glimpsed in the final language on investment and competition. Despite losing the battle to stop negotiations on these new issues, developing countries that resisted their inclusion, including India, Pakistan, the African Group as a whole, Least Developed Countries (LDCs), the Caribbean countries and a few others, were able to introduce some flexibility into the language. By including the words "explicit consensus" as a precondition for the launch of these negotiations, they opened the possibility that negotiations can be blocked at the next ministerial conference in 2003 (just as elimination of the use of export subsidies in EU agricultural policy is still but a distant target). While not a ringing success, the new flexibility offers developing countries scope to resist the developed countries’ agenda.

Still another instance of the developing countries’ growing assertiveness was reflected, not in the Doha Declaration itself, but in a meeting of Ministers of Trade and representatives from around 20 developing countries held during the conference. At this meeting, Ministers discussed the "Development Box." The Development Box is a proposal to create stronger provisions in the WTO Agreement on Agriculture for the protection of food security and rural development in developing countries. Although the proposal for such measures did not make it into the final Declaration, the meeting reflected the culmination of years of work by NGOs and governments to ensure that multilateral trade rules better reflect the problems of international agricultural trade. These problems include dumping of agricultural products below cost--a problem nowhere addressed in the existing agreement on agriculture, except in as much as export subsidies and credits contribute to the problem. The problems also include disincentives to production in developing countries that should, and need, to increase local production to meet employment and food security objectives. The meeting sent a political signal that will strengthen the position of negotiators promoting the Development Box, as negotiations on agriculture go forward in Geneva.

However, at the most basic level of democratic process--that of external transparency--next to nothing was achieved in Doha. The declaration calls for more rapid document dissemination, which is urgently needed, but is a woefully small concession. It is long past time that the WTO decided to end the presumption of secrecy that affects all WTO documents. Moreover, this process has shown once again that some form of written procedure on internal transparency is needed within the WTO in order to ensure that all members, especially the most powerful members and the Secretariat, are held accountable.

The Doha Declaration also calls for improving public understanding of the benefits of liberalized trade, betraying an outlook that points to another problem: how the WTO should be integrated into the wider arena of multilateral organizations. The WTO’s mandate is to regulate trade, remove barriers that damage other countries’ interests, while controlling aspects of trade that undermine the economic benefits trade can bring. The WTO does not have a mandate--except in the minds of some of its current champions--to liberalize trade without regard to the consequences. The continued use of WTO resources to promote a monolithic vision for trade is part of the reason that the WTO attracts such strong opposition in both developed and developing countries. The simplistic assertion that trade liberalization only has benefits does not reflect real life experience.

In every other arena, from city councils through national parliaments to inter-governmental negotiations, governments are vocal about the problems that existing rules for globalization have created. Even erstwhile champions of a very narrow view of the roles of government, capital, markets and social policy such as the World Bank have come to a more balanced message. It is just not credible that the same set of policy prescriptions can work for countries as diverse as Switzerland and Swaziland. Until the WTO understands that technical capacity-building and longer implementation periods for agreements cannot by themselves accommodate the needs of developing countries, it is unclear how the WTO can "normalize" its role in international policy-making.

The first paragraphs of the Doha Declaration reveal how little contact trade ministries have with other ministries in their own governments. The mantra of trade liberalization intoned in the Declaration’s opening belies both the actual contradictions within the trade rules overseen by the WTO, and what we know about economics and the role of trade within it. Coupling the phrase "sustainable development" with "liberalized trade" does nothing to ensure that the latter will promote the former. Rather, it leaves unanswered the question of how and when the WTO will join a dialogue on how best to manage globalization, and to what effect. Many negotiators from developing countries pointed this out before Doha, and during Doha the Prime Minister of India in his speech to the United Nations said much the same thing.

One small opening to this debate secured in Doha is the inclusion of negotiations on the relationship between Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) and the WTO. As it is, the mandate is not what it should be. It hedges possible outcomes of these negotiations by protecting non-parties to MEAs in ways that might further discourage countries such as the United States from taking responsibility for their economies’ impact on the global commons. There is also the question of which institution should house this negotiation: is the WTO, which takes such a narrow view of environmental protection, the best forum? At some time, the relationship needs to be determined in a forum that balances open trade with the protection and promotion of the environment. Even though another forum might better manage these negotiations, the WTO must itself grapple with these issues. The proposed negotiations on MEAs’ relationship to WTO agreements sends a signal that WTO member states will not forever consider trade rules in a vacuum.

Where does this leave us? It would be wonderful if between now and the UN’s Financing for Development Conference, to be held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, the WTO were to accept the need to consider trade in the wider context of global governance. This is of course not likely. But perhaps by the time of the next WTO Ministerial Conference in 2003, also to be held in Monterrey, we will see more progress towards transparency and multilateral policy coherence. Ultimately, the WTO must play a constructive role in addressing the urgent development problems we face or risk collapse.