MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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As a new round of global trade talks opens in Seattle, KEVIN CAREY suspects that their sole purpose is the promotion of Western selfishness.
As the Uruguay Round of trade talks began, before GATT began the WTO, peanuts were being loaded at Banjul bound for England. In reply to an obvious question the Trade Minister told me that Gambia was not allowed to process and package the peanuts to give them added value as this would invoke punitive tariffs. Of course, there was no imaginable way in which the Government and business could have organised a flow of peanuts and the processing machinery to match the European Union or the United States but that was beside the point; these were the economics of the fat bully stealing the last square of chocolate from a scrawny schoolfellow. Value added in Gambia would have gone unnoticed in Georgia.
Will it be any different at the end of the WTO Seattle trade round? Let us review the major elements. The United States, and to a much lesser extent the European Union, believes, it says, in absolutely, unrestricted free trade. This means that there should be absolutely unlimited access by every country to every other country's market on a reciprocally liberal basis. This, of course, is utter nonsense.
In the first place, the history of trade, so succinctly and comprehensively (not a paradox) described by Paul Kennedy in his Rise and Fall of the Great Powersshows conclusively that only the strongest power is ever in favour of absolute free trade and that, as soon as power shifts, as it inevitably will, the waning power calls for new protections whilst the waxing power calls for the abolition of old ones. It cannot be expected that United States trade negotiators will bear this in mind when taking their positions; what will happen when it is surpassed some time in the next Century is too far ahead for them to contemplate.
Secondly, and this goes for the European Union too, this simple free trade proposition does not apply to agriculture, an area of the economy which centrally affects the future of the developing world and particularly those parts of it with high unemployment, widespread starvation and planet-shaming infant mortality. It is - using the word in its proper sense - hypocritical for extreme liberal market Republicans to praise their God, ignore their starving fellow human beings and then go on to blame them for their own terrible plight when it is the same free market extremists who make the rules that at least in part cause the starvation.
Thirdly, and in some ways paradoxically, the Western free marketeers are the last to allow labour market freedom as a component of their liberalism, wishing to impose restrictions on economies which employ childhood labour; one wonders whether the opposition is moral or simply a matter of commercial advantage. How can one oppose infant labouring but sanction infant mortality?
I have seen the eyes of starving children melt overnight into nothing for want of a daily handful of spinach and I can personally testify that children and their mothers would not do as they do if it were not an absolute necessity; and I can say with very little fear of contradiction that it is we in the West that have imposed that necessity through illiberal trade policy.
There is, however, a wider issue than the unfairness and inconsistency of the Western case. The WTO is a newcomer amongst international and world organisations and yet it unthinkingly, or perhaps unblinkingly, assumes that its agreements must always take precedence over every other international agreement.
The issue of hormones in beef pits the WTO against the WHO; and the GMO movement is contrary to Kyoto.
Shall we allow untrammelled trade liberalisation to take precedence over our own health and over the climatic conditions in which we live? How often must the Eastern Seaboard of the United States be inundated before its Washington and Wall Street victims make the vital connection?
Interestingly, the consumers of Europe, usually thought of as supine in comparison with their American cousins, have set off a powder train of complaint against the GMO industry that is now causing minor explosions in the Mid-West.
It is not wishful thinking to see this as a harbinger; if there are two obsessions of American life which strike Europeans as gross they are wealth and health. Yet the modern rendition of the eye of the needle is surely that the rich, grown obese, find it difficult to squeeze through the gate; but, at a more mundane level, it is only a matter of time now before citizen consumers will see uncontrolled free trade --- taking precedence over all other kinds of jurisdiction --- as a danger to their health and systematic postponement of the visit from the grim reaper.
It is easy to scoff at the organs of the United Nations that promote better health and social justice and easier yet to dismiss the disparate array of non-governmental organisations, though in the latter case such criticism comes oddly from those in favour of less government.
It is also easy to compare hard trade treaty language with soft environmental and social edicts. And it is easiest of all to clothe selfishness in the garb of economic liberty; but if liberty in a national polity is indivisible then liberty in a global agreement ought also be indivisible; and part of that mutuality involves global collective ownership of the consequences of global agreements.
So, if South Asian child labour is outlawed and the cost of its manufactures rises, the gap must be filled collectively; but if the final agreement in this trade round makes it more lucrative for loggers to destroy the SouthEast Asian and Latin American forests, no collective action will be able to make good the loss before we all suffer the climatic consequences.
Never was there such a prospect of political lemmings hurling themselves over the cliff than is presented by Seattle but it isn't the suicide I mind, it is the mass murder that goes with it, the murder of the economically and politically weak and of the voiceless innocent.
It seems improbable that a gathering devoted entirely to the prosecution of selfishness will exercise any restraint other than that imposed by fear; so let us hope that although the delegates will be incapable of self restraint they might still be capable of fear.
We will see a good deal too much cuddly toy concern from lobbyists but what those people need, desperately eking out a living on the mud flats in the Ganges delta, is equal access in a global textiles market, not Congress shutting out these cheap goods on trade grounds dressed up as humanitarian concern.
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