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The
Worst of Times
Part
One of a Three-Part Series on Trade
by
George Monbiot
September
3, 2003
The
world is beginning to look like France, a few years before the Revolution.
There are no reliable wealth statistics from that time, but the disparities are
unlikely to have been greater than they are today. The wealthiest 5% of the
world's people now earn 114 times as much as the poorest 5%. (1)
The 500 richest people on earth now own $1.54 trillion -- more than the entire
gross domestic product of Africa, or the combined annual incomes of the poorest
half of humanity. (2)
Now,
just as then, the desperation of the poor counterpoises the obscene consumption
of the rich. Now, just as then, the sages employed by the global aristocrats --
in the universities, the thinktanks, the newspapers and magazines -- contrive
to prove that we possess the best of all possible systems in the best of all
possible worlds. In the fortress of Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay we have our
Bastille, in which men are imprisoned without charge or trial.
Like
the court at Versailles, the wealth and splendour of the nouveau-ancien regime
will be on display, not far from the stinking slums in which hunger reigns, at
next week's world trade summit in Cancun in Mexico. Between banquets and
champagne receptions, men like the European trade commissioner Pascal Lamy and
the US trade representative Robert Zoellick will dismiss with their customary
arrogance the needs of the hungry majority. There we will witness the same
corruption, of both purpose and execution, the same conflation of the private
good with the public good: le monde, c'est nous. As Charles Dickens wrote of
the ruling class of that earlier time: "the leprosy of unreality
disfigured every human creature in attendance". (3)
The
unreality begins in Mexico with the World Trade Organisation's statement of
intent. It will, its director-general says, ensure that "development issues
lie at the heart" of the negotiations. (4) The new
talks, in other words, are designed to help the people of the poor nations to
escape from poverty. In almost every respect they are destined to do the
opposite. Every promise the rich world has made the poor world is being broken.
Every demand for the further expropriation of the wealth of the poor is being
pursued with ruthless persistence.
Take,
for example, the issue of "tariffs", or taxes on trade. A new report
by Oxfam, published today, shows that the poorer a nation is, the higher the
rates of tax it must pay in order to export its goods. (5)
The United States imposes tariffs of between zero and one per cent on major
imports from Britain, France, Japan and Germany, but taxes of 14 or 15% on
produce from Bangladesh, Cambodia and Nepal. The British government does the
same: Sri Lanka and Uruguay must pay eight times as much to sell their goods
over here as the United States.
This
happens for two reasons. The first is that the poorer nations can't fight back.
The second is that, without taxes, the poor would outcompete the rich. The
stiffest tariffs are imposed on goods such as textiles and farm products, in
which the weak nations possess a commercial advantage.
The
current trade talks were launched with the promise that tariffs would be
reduced or eliminated, "in particular on products of export interest to
developing countries." (6) The deadline for producing
an agreed text for the Cancun meeting was May 31st. Because the rich nations
have blocked every attempt to agree upon the wording, nothing has been
produced. Instead, last week the European Union, the US and Canada submitted a
new paper. It proposes that the poorest countries must do the most to cut their
trade taxes. Bolivia and Kenya must reduce their tariffs by 80%, the EU by 28%
and the US by just 24%. (7) It appears to be a calculated
insult, designed to prevent any agreement on this issue from taking place.
Nor
has any progress been made on farm subsidies. In 1994, the rich countries
agreed that they would phase them out, if the poor countries promised to open
their markets to western corporations. The poor nations kept their promise, the
rich countries broke theirs. The new round of talks is supposed to lead to the
"phasing out [of] all forms of export subsidies", (8)
and a negotiating text to this effect was meant to have been produced by 31st
March. Again, the promise has been broken, and again the poor have been told
that if only they grant the rich world's corporations even greater access to
their economies, farm subsidies will come to an end.
But
the powerful nations, while refusing to address the demands of the poor, press
their own claims with brutal diplomacy. They now insist that the
"development round" be used to force nations to grant foreign
corporations the same rights as domestic ones; to open their public services to
the private sector and to invite foreign companies to bid to run them. What
this means, as nearly all the big multinational corporations are based in the
rich world, is a rich world takeover of the poor world's economy.
Lamy
and Zoellick and the governments (such as ours) they represent must know that
these demands are impossible for the weaker countries to meet. They must know
that the combination of their broken promises and their outrageous terms could
force the weaker governments to walk out of the trade talks in Cancun, just as
they did in Seattle in 1999. They must know that this will mean the end of the
World Trade Organisation. And this now appears to be their aim. Subverted and
corrupted as the WTO is, it remains a multilateral body in which the poor
nations can engage in collective bargaining and, in theory, outvote the rich.
This never happens, because the rich nations have bypassed its decision-making
structures. But the danger remains, so the EU and the US appear to wish to
destroy it, and to replace world trade agreements with even more coercive
single-country deals. The narrow path campaigners have to tread is to expose
the injustices of the proposed agreements without assisting the rich world's
underlying agenda by demanding that "the WTO has got to go".
But
eventually, as in France, there must be a revolution. It is likely to happen
only when there is a globalised crisis of survival: a worldwide shortage of
grain, for example (like the deficit which followed the bad harvest of 1788) or
- and this is currently more likely and more imminent - a shortage of fossil
fuel. In previous columns I have suggested some of the means (such as a
threatened collective default on the debt) (9) by which
this revolution can take place. Until the nouveau-ancien regime has been
overthrown, and Lamy and Zoellick and their kind are (metaphorically) swinging
from the lampposts, the rich, like the aristocrats of France, will devise ever
more inventive means of dispossessing the poor.
Next
week: How do we best support the demands of the poor world?
George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at
the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of
Environmental Science at the University of East London. He writes a weekly
column for the Guardian newspaper of London. His recently released book, The
Age of Consent (Flamingo Press), puts forth proposals for global democratic
governance. His articles and contact info can be found at his website: www.monbiot.com.
* Beware the
Bluewash: The UN Should not Become the Dustbin for America's Failed Adventures
* Poisoned
Chalice: Wherever it is Prescribed, a Dose of IMF Medicine Only Compounds
Economic Crisis
* SleepWalking
to Extinction
* Driven
Out of Eden
* Shadow of
Extinction: Only Six Degrees Separate Our World from the Cataclysmic End of an
Ancient Era
* I Was
Wrong About Trade: “Localization” is Both Destructive and Unjust
* Seize the Day:
Using Globalization As Vehicle For the First Global Democratic Revolution
* Trashing
Africa: Blair Has Ensured that Europe and the US Will Continue to Promote
Famine
* War
Crimes Case in Belgium Illustrates Folly of Blair’s Belief That US is
Interested in Justice
1.
United Nations Development Programme, 2003. Human Development Report 2003.
Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford.
2.
John Cavanagh and Sarah Anderson, 2002. World's Billionaires Take a Hit, But
Still Soar. Institute of Policy Studies. http://www.ips-dc.org/projects/global_econ/billionaires.htm
3.
Charles Dickens, 1859. A Tale of Two Cities (taken from the Wordsworth Classics
edition, 1993).
4.
Supachai Panitchpakdi, 25 November 2002. The Doha Development Agenda:
Challenges Ahead. Speech to the European Parliament, Brussels.
5.
Oxfam, 2nd September 2003. Briefing Paper 53: Running into the Sand: why
failure at the Cancun trade talks threatens the world's poorest people. Oxfam,
Oxford.
6.
World Trade Organisation, November 2001. The Doha Ministerial Declaration,
paragraph 16: Market access for non-agricultural products.
7.
Oxfam, August 2003. New standards in double standards: the EU-US-Canada
proposals for non-agricultural market access in the WTO. Oxfam, Oxford.
8.
World Trade Organisation, November 2001. The Doha Ministerial Declaration,
paragraph 13: Agriculture.
9.
This idea is explained in George Monbiot, 2003. The Age of Consent: A Manifesto
for a New World Order (Flamingo,
London, 2003).