Commercialising sustainability: the wto in the WSSD
19/08/2002
- Opinión
(This report was written after the Prep Com IV of the WSSD in Bali.
Three months later, little has changed.)
For almost two weeks, government delegates at the Fourth Preparatory
Committee Meeting (Prep Com IV) for the World Summit on Sustainable
Development (WSSD) have been locked in a bitter battle to come up
with a programme o f action to take to Johannesburg this August.
Reports from those observing the various negotiating sessions, and
the state of the June 2 version of the Draft Plan of Implementation
(also referred to as the Chairman's text ) reveal a hopeless deadlock
along North-South, North-North and even South-South lines.
At the heart of the deadlock are trade liberalisation, corporate
accountability and regulation, domestic environments for private
investment, governance, development financing, technology transfer,
and technical assistance and capacity building. Japan, the United
States (US), Canada, Australia and New Zealand (the JUSCANZ group)
have knocked down most attempts to set specific targets and timelines
for inter-governmental commitments and multilateral initiatives. The
European Union (EU) has tried to hide its quest for markets behind
clamors of ratifying Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs).
All have been quick to block any attempts to reign in trade and
investment liberalisation or curb the power of the corporate sector.
The G-77 and China have stumbled along, unable to come up with
collective positions that adequately represent the priorities of the
Group's diverse members. Progressive Southern delegates have been
either absent or silent in key negotiations and overall, G-77 members
seem content to let the OPEC agenda serve as the common position for
the entire Group.
What most delegates do seem agreed on, though, is that economic
globalisation and the WTO trade regime must not be compromised by
airy-fairy talk about sustainability. Disagreements in the Chairman's
text are more indicative of governmental differences about form and
modalities than about substantive positions regarding sustainability.
IS THE CHAIRMAN'S TEXT ABOUT SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT?
In a word, no. The first paragraph of the Chairman's Text reaffirms
governments' commitment to the Rio principles, the full
implementation of Agenda 21, achieving internationally agreed
development goals--including those contained in the United Nations
(UN) Millenium Declaration-and the outcomes of major UN conferences
and international agreements since 1992. Well, here is the first
fundamental drawback of the Draft Plan of Implementation .
The most significant international agreement in the past ten years
has been the establishment of the WTO. Agreements negotiated within
the WTO have far greater enforceability than those in any other
multilateral forum. Th e Chairman's text reiterates at several places
the commitment of governments to implement WTO agreements and
initiatives. But as millions of people in the world already know and
millions more are about find out, it requires tremendous imagination
and a gigantic leap of faith to see any positive correlation between
the WTO and sustainable development.
In the WSSD framework, sustainable development is supposedly
dependent on three pillars: environment, economic and social. It is
logical to assume that by this definition, a sustainable development
agenda would attempt to forward actions that support equality,
social, economic and environmental justice, environmental protection,
equitable opportunities for human, social and economic development,
peoples' rights to safe and healthy environments and livelihoods,
etc. But this is not the case. The broad actions outlined in the
Chairman's text do not tackle the causes and foundations of
unsustainability and inequity that are destabilising our lives and
planet . Instead, they back the standard, globalisation-friendly
prescriptions with the word "sustainable" attached as prefixes.
An interesting strategy in the Draft Plan is how challenges to and
responsibilities for sustainable development are divided between
developed and developing countries. The main problem put before
developed countries in the Plan is wasteful and unsustainable
consumption, while developing countries are guilty of both
unsustainable production and consumption. But, developed countries
have the capital, technology, resources, institutional structures
and know-how to implement sustainable development, which developing
countries do not have. Developing countries, on the other hand, have
most of the poor people in the world, and since (as indicated in the
Plan) poverty results in unsustainability, it is the developing
countries that must take firm and decisive steps towards sustainable
development.
What then follows as a roadmap to address the challenges of
sustainable development is little more than a reaffirmation of
colonial economic relations: developing countries must undertake a
range of actions in all sectors towards sustainable development by
using the technologies, institutional capacities and financial
resources owned by developed countries. These will be paid for by
providing developed countries and their corporations access to the
natural resources and markets of developing countries. The promise of
future foreign investment, financial support and technical assistance
from developed countries would be conditional on the willingness of
developing countries to implement whatever actions are deemed
supportive of sustainable development in the Draft Plan. Notable
among these are the creation of a "conducive domestic enabling
environment" for increasing foreign investment and full
implementation of the work-plan from the WTO Ministerial Meeting in
Doha.
The model of export-led and growth-directed development promoted by
rich, industrialised countries and their even richer corporations,
and by international institutions such as the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), the WTO, and regional development
banks remains untouched in the Chairman's text. The narrow economic
imperatives of profit and wealth concentration that drive this model
and have resulted in today's ecological disasters also remain
unchallenged. The text does not acknowledge the role of past and
present structural adjustment programmes, increasing militarisation,
staggering debt burdens and consistently deteriorating terms of
trade on the economies, environments and societies of developing
countries.
Instead, the Draft Plan proposes that the capacities of developing
countries be strengthened through increased interventions from the
same actors who have been instrumental in precipitating the
structural crises of impoverishment, environmental destruction and
social insecurity: international financial institutions, the WTO,
regional trade blocs, and private corporations. New on the debt
crisis front are debt for sustainable development swaps, and the
involvement of the private sector in resolving crises arising from
indebtedness-much of which was created through unregulated private
investments in the first place. Calls for a legally enforceable
framework for corporate accountability have been rolled back to
"Type II partnerships" through which private corporations would bring
money and technology to the table in exchange for less regulation and
public oversight.
The Draft Plan of Implementation does not contain any discussion
about sustainable development itself. It is guided by the assumption
that corporate globalisation is more or less fine, and that by adding
the term "sustain able" to what is already common practice,
governments can go about their usual business of transferring public
wealth to private coffers without having to think any further about
the deteriorating conditions of life faced by the majority of their
populations. The privatisation of development financing enshrined in
the Monterrey Consensus has seamlessly extended into the WSSD text.
The Draft Plan advances a much-expanded role for the private
corporate sector in sustainable development, but without the
necessary accompanying mechanisms for legally binding and enforceable
mechanisms for corporate accountability and responsibility.
In fact, Section V of the Draft Plan (Sustainable Development in a
Globalising World) lays out a series of actions required to "make
globalisation work for sustainable development." Predictably, these
include the same policies that have led to the ecological, social
and economic crises that most people in the world face today: greater
overall liberalisation of the economy, unregulated export-oriented
trade and investment, increased power to the corporate private sector
through public-private "partnerships," decreased regulatory
responsibility on the parts of governments, and the promotion of
voluntary initiatives for corporate accountability and reporting ,
including the Global Compact. At the same time, developing country
governments must implement "good governance" prescriptions laid out
by international institutions in order to increase the efficiency of
ODA, attract capital flows and facilitate international private
sector investments (including those from transnational corporations.
The Chairman's text carries language on strengthening the capacities
of women, indigenous peoples and small farmers. But the text is blind
to the fact that their disempowerment is an accumulated result of
years of marginalisation from lands, forests and water sources that
they have sustainably stewarded for generations, from decent and safe
employment, and from appropriate and sufficient human development
opportunities. Through the logic of profits and efficiency, economic
globalisation has undermined the fundamental rights of women,
indigenous peoples, small farmers and fishers, workers and future
generations to food, productive assets, development, heal th,
education, economic, social and cultural autonomy, and self-
determination. In the framework laid out in the Chairman's text, they
must now resort to market mechanisms to claim what should be
rightfully theirs to begin with.
DOHA + 10 MONTHS
The Draft Plan of Implementation clearly establishes the central
place of the WTO in any future framework for sustainable development.
Increased trade liberalisation through regional trade agreements is
also encouraged, b ut only if it is consistent with the multilateral
trading system as defined through the WTO. The WTO's role in the
Draft Plan is non-negotiable and the text asserts in various sections
that all policy and implementation mechanisms are expected to be
consistent with the WTO framework and rules. Among others, the text
proposes:
- Successfully completing the work launched under the Doha
Ministerial Declaration; here the text calls upon WTO members to pay
attention to the important deadlines that must be met to ensure
progress by the Fifth Ministerial Conference and successful
conclusions of negotiations by 1 January, 2005
- Undertaking further action at national, regional and international
levels to complement and support the Doha Declaration
- Enhancing the delivery of trade-related technical assistance and
capacity building programmes
- Simplifying domestic procedures to facilitate developing country
exporters - Identifying and developing trade-environment linkages;
the text urges the Trade and Environment Committee in the WTO to
start on this as soon as possible; - Promoting public-private and
multi-sector "partnerships" to provide essential services such as
safe water, sanitation, waste-management, electricity, education,
etc.; many if these areas are of interest to richer WTO members for
the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)
- Implementing the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs)
Agreement; this is rationalised from the perspective of protecting
public health, but without any discussion about the disastrous
effects of the TRIPs Agreement on local-national bio-diversity,
traditional knowledge, genetic resources, bio-piracy, and the
domestic abilities for industrialisation and to develop new
technologies in developing countries
- Increasing market access for goods within the framework of the Doha
Ministerial Declaration; - Committing/achieving on the part of
developed countries the objective of providing duty-free and quota-
free access for exports from all least developed countries
- Facilitating the accession of developing countries to the WTO,
particularly the least developed countries and countries with
economies in transition
- Focussing the WTO's assistance efforts, particularly the 2003 plan,
on advancing the Doha agenda
- Fully implementing the Integrated Framework for Trade-Related
Technical Assistance (IF) to Least Developed Countries;
- Reviewing and operationalising all special and differential
treatment provisions in the WTO with a view to making them more
precise and effective, including concluding a framework agreement on
special and differential treatment
- Fulfilling the commitment of comprehensive negotiations on the
Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), aiming at substantial improvements in
market access, reduction with a view of phasing out all forms of
export subsidies, sub stantial reductions in trade-distorting
domestic support, and taking into account non-trade concerns
- Promoting relationships between globalisation and social
development to help developing countries improve the implementation
of core labour standards, including through ILO mechanisms
- Promoting/supporting the creation of domestic and international
markets for organic produce and increasing technical assistance for
developing countries for quality control compliance and preservation
of consumer confidence; this would likely involve the application of
Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) measures and new food safety
standards by richer countries
- Promoting the creation of voluntary, market based mechanisms to
encourage production and trade in organic produce
- Committing to comprehensively address the problems faced by
developing countries in the implementation of the Uruguay Round
Agreements; special attention to be paid to the imbalances and
inherent asymmetries in some WTO agreements
- Establishing legal and regulatory frameworks in supplier and
recipient countries to expedite the transfer of technologies to
developing countries in a cost -effective manner by public and
private sectors; this would likely raise the problems of
intellectual property rights and patent protections; -
Promoting/ensuring coherence and mutual supportiveness between the
rules of the multilateral trading systems and multilateral
environment agreements (MEAs) in support of the work progranmme
agreed through the WTO
Reports from the contact group on trade during the negotiations
indicate that countries are more than willing to insert the entire
work programme that emerged from the Doha Ministerial meeting into
the WSSD's Draft Plan o f Implementation. Delegates at the contact
group had copies of the Doha work programme in hand as they
negotiated line-by-line the relevant sections on globalisation, trade
and finance, and implementation.
The nature of negotiations too is reminiscent of the WTO: in the
absence of clear agreement or consensus, the text proposed by the US
or the EU unfailingly became the alternative formulation with the G-
77 and others stand ing by. Needless to say, much of the text
proposed by the G-77 did not receive support from the QUAD (US,
Japan, Canada and EU) countries. The G-77 and China pushed hard for
more special and differential treatment provisions, but were turned
down by the US and the EU, who were firm that WSSD commitments could
not surpass those made in the WTO. There were even rumors of off-the-
record, exclusive, closed meetings between the US, EU and G-77 to
achieve "consensus" on the most contested portions of the Chairman's
text.
So obvious is the infusion of the WTO-Doha work programme into the
Chairman's text that Dr. Wolfgang Sachs, a well known ecological
activist, remarked in disgust: "instead of Rio + 10 years, this
should be called Doha + 1 0 months".
The WTO agenda is further entrenched in the Draft Plan of
Implementation through recommendations for increased collaboration
between the UN system, international financial institutions and the
WTO. Overall, the text proposes strengthening the role and efforts
of the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) in "furthering the benefits
of globalisation" to sustainable development. "Policy coherence" is
the order of the day and the Bretton Woods an d UN agencies must
jointly commit to implementing whatever will be left of Agenda 21,
relevant parts of the UN Millenium Declaration, the Monterrey
Consensus and of course, all the outcomes of the Doha Ministerial
Meeting .
PASSING UNREGULATED TRADE AS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Despite language in the WTO's preamble about enhancing social welfare
and promoting development, the WTO is not a development institution.
It is an unequal, inequitable, highly non-transparent and
unaccountable institution. It protects and advances the interests of
large corporations, most of which are based in rich northern
countries and many of which are transnational in nature.
Trade is an extremely important economic activity and has a critical
place in national development and the strengthening of domestic
economic capacity. However, the trade regime imposed through the WTO
does not serve such a function. The WTO was established in order to
expand and accelerate the process of corporate globalisation, and
this is reflected in its agreements, institutional framework, work
programmes and decision-making processes. To equate the WTO with
sustainable development is to kill any progressive notion left in the
conceptualisation of sustainability or development.
The economic model promoted through the WTO is based on and
perpetuates extractive and unsustainable forms of production and
consumption, and fosters export dependency and indebtedness at the
national, local and individual levels. Countries that come out ahead
in the WTO system are those with already significant advantages of
accumulated capital, and well-developed technological, industrial,
production and institutional capacities. Countries without these
advantages are reduced to playing "catch-up" since the equity
enhancing measures in the WTO are never implemented in step with the
negotiation of new agreements.
In the model of corporate globalisation that the WTO advances, the
stuff of everyday life, pleasure and recreation, and even
humanitarian crises are all redefined as business opportunities.
Hence, there are ever increasing moves to expand unregulated trade
and investment efforts into all areas of basic needs and survival:
food, agriculture, water, health, sanitation, environmental
protection, education, emergency services, tourism, funeral
services, etc. The WTO's agreements on Agriculture (AoA) and Services
(GATS) will ensure that every aspect of our lives, from birth to
death, will be commercialised, and out of our hands and
jurisdictions.
The outcomes of the WTO Ministerial meeting in Doha do not constitute
a development agenda by any standards except those observed by the
WTO itself. While the Doha Declaration contained some language on the
need to pay more attention to implementation issues, the work
programme outlined in the Declaration did not make any specific
commitments to address long-standing inequalities and imbalances in
the capacities of developing countries to negotiate a development-
friendly trade agenda.
The work programme did not include firm commitments to implement
special and differential treatment provisions, nor did it acknowledge
the requests by developing countries to comprehensively review the
TRIPs Agreement and the state of privatisation in developing
countries before moving forward with GATS negotiations. Instead, the
work programme was expanded to include new issues-investment,
competition, trade facilitation, and government procurement-and
thereby increasing the work burden on developing countries already
struggling with small, under-resourced and under-financed
delegations. In addition, a new section on environmental services was
added to t he Declaration at the eleventh hour without consultation
with majority of the developing countries.
It is indeed extremely worrying that the WTO trade regime and the
Doha work programme have such a central role in the Draft Plan of
Implementation for the WSSD. The policy coherence proposed in the
Chairman's text in effect spells out further subservience of the UN
agencies to the BWIs since the BWIs come backed with far greater
financial backing from the G-7 and OECD countries than the UN. And
through this latest move in Prep Com IV, the WTO is well on its way
to becoming a totalitarian global government with the blessings of
the UN system.
Allowing this to happen practically amounts to giving away our
environments, cultures, social and economic potentials, and
fundamental rights to private corporations, who will continue to
operate with greater impunity than before. It will undermine any
future possibility of genuinely sustainable development. Although
much of the text in the Draft Implementation Plan is still in bold
typeface and bracketed (which indicates that agreement h as not yet
been reached), the nature of negotiations thus far do not provide
signs of hope that the final text adopted in Johannesburg will be
much of an improvement on the current draft.
The challenge before us is not whether we can change this or that
paragraph in the Draft Plan of Implementation, but whether we can
push our governments to come up with a plan for sustainable
development instead of one for unregulated trade and investment.
On these grounds, and in order to salvage the principles and future
possibilities for sustainable development, non-business, non-
corporate civil society must reject any inter-governmental
declaration from Prep Com IV that legitimises the Draft Plan of
Implementation. The WTO and corporate economic globalisation must not
come into the WSSD. Instead, we must come up with alternative
programmes for genuinely sustainable development and intensify our
work at national levels to ensure that our governments defend and
protect our rights in Johannesburg.
FOCUS ON TRADE
NUMBER 80, AUGUST 2002
https://www.alainet.org/de/node/109142
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