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Whose
Side Are You On?
Some
of Those Calling for Changes in the Way we Trade
Are
Working Against the Interests of the Poor
Part
two of a three-part series on trade
by
George Monbiot
September
9, 2003
Read Part One: The Worst of
Times
Outside the world trade
talks beginning in Cancun in Mexico tomorrow, two battles will be fought. The
first will be the battle between the campaigners demanding fair trade and the
rich-nation delegates demanding unfair trade. The second will be the dispute
now brewing within the ranks of those who claim to be helping the poor.
The problem all those
who want a fairer deal face is that there has seldom, if ever, been a trade
treaty struck between rich and poor which does not amount to legalised theft.
The draft agreement the members of the World Trade Organisation will discuss
this week is no exception. While it permits the rich nations to continue
protecting their markets, it seeks to force the poor nations to open their
economies to several novel forms of institutional piracy.
Yet the poorer
countries desperately want an effective trade treaty. Their negotiators know
that the rich world is trying to rob them, and they are loathe to approve an
agreement which allows its corporations to run off with everything but their
kidneys (that comes later). But they are also aware that both the US and the
European Union appear to be doing all they can to force them to walk out. As
any trades unionist knows, when the poor cannot bargain collectively, the rich
can impose whatever rules they please.
The response of some
of those in the rich world who are disgusted with their governments' proposals
is to suggest that poor nations should withdraw from most kinds of
international trade. But this introduces another problem. The poor countries
need money and, in particular, hard money. They have few means of obtaining it.
Piracy worked well for the nations which are rich today, but the poor are in no
position to reciprocate. Aid locks its recipients into patronage and
dependency. The only remaining option appears to be trade. The three million
people from the poorer nations who have so far signed Oxfam's petition are
calling not to "make trade go away", but to "make trade
fair". And this is where they part company from some of those who claim to
support them.
Few people in the rich
world now admit that they wish drastically to reduce the value of exports from
the poor nations, but several prominent campaigners are promoting policies
which lead to this outcome. When, in June, I suggested that
"localisation" (the proposal that everything which can be produced locally
should be produced locally) would damage the interests of poorer nations, Dr
Spencer Fitz-Gibbon, the press officer of the Green Party, sent me a furious
letter of complaint. (1) Localisation, he insisted, would
help the poor by permitting them to be self-reliant and by reducing trade's
contribution to climate change. "We are advocating a world of relatively
balanced, relatively self-reliant economies. That ultimately means the poorer
country manufacturing its own frying pans and computers and pencils". It
sounds sensible and obvious, until you take a moment to examine the
implications.
If every country is to
manufacture its own frying pans and computers and pencils, then every country
would require bauxite, iron ore, copper, silicon, feedstock, graphite, softwood
and all the other raw materials required for their manufacture. If the country
does not possess them, it must import them. Because raw materials are heavier,
importing raw materials rather than finished products means that more fossil
fuel must be used in transport. "Self-reliance" of this kind thus
increases, rather than reduces, trade's contribution to climate change.
Just as dangerously,
while self-reliance may be feasible for the richer nations, most of the poorer
countries simply do not possess a domestic market of sufficient size to make
the manufacturing of complex products worthwhile. Suggest to an Ethiopian
economist that her nation should have a computing industry of its own, serving
only its own market, and she would laugh in your face. Because the market is
small, as the Ethiopians are poor, each computer would cost many times as much
as those produced in the rich world. Their comparative purchasing power would
then become even weaker, and the technology they wanted would fall still
further out of reach. If Ethiopian businesses, hospitals and universities were
to be viable, they would have to import their computers from abroad, as they do
today.
For this they would
require foreign exchange. But, under the Green Party's system, they would find
it even harder to obtain than they do at present, for the rich world will also
have been striving for (and will be far likelier to obtain) self-reliance in
manufacturing. The blindingly obvious result is that the only products the poor
countries can then sell to the rich ones are raw materials. I put these points
to Dr Fitz-Gibbon two months ago. I have yet to receive a response.
Global justice surely
requires that the people of the rich world, whatever their governments might
want, campaign to help the poor nations reclaim as much of our ill-gotten
wealth as possible. Just policies have been proposed by groups such as Oxfam,
Christian Aid and the World Development Movement, which call, for example, for
the democratisation of the World Trade Organisation; an agreement which permits
the poorest countries to defend their infant export industries from direct
competition; and binding international rules to force all corporations to trade
fairly. Most of the localists, who appear determined to have their cake and eat
it, also claim to support these positions. They have yet to address or even to
acknowledge the glaring contradictions in which they have become entangled.
To these just measures
we can add another, recently developed by the man who designed the
"contraction and convergence" plan for tackling climate change,
Aubrey Meyer. Contraction and convergence, which the African governments have
now adopted as their official position on climate change, first establishes how
much carbon dioxide humans can produce each year without cooking the planet. It
then divides that sum between all the people of the world, and allocates to
each nation, on the basis of its population, a quota for gas production. It
proposes a steady contraction of the total production of climate-changing gases
and a convergence, to equality, of national production per head of population.
To produce more than its share a nation must first buy unused quota from
another one. (2)
Meyer points out that
by accelerating convergence we would grant the poor world a massive trade
advantage. Those nations using the least fossil fuel would possess a
near-monopoly over the trade in emissions. This would help redress the economic
balance between rich and poor and compensate the poor for the damage inflicted
by the rich nations' pollution. (3)
We have the
opportunity to fight for something unprecedented: a trade treaty stacked
against the rich. But if we are serious about campaigning for fair rules, we
must also cease campaigning for unfair ones. The localists must confront their
contradictions and decide whose side they are on.
Next week:
Picking up the pieces from Cancun.
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.
* The Worst of
Times: Part One of a Three-Part Series on Trade
* 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
References:
1. Open letter from Spencer Fitz-Gibbon to George Monbiot, 25th
June 2003. This letter can be read online at http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/06/273186.html
2. See Aubrey Meyer, 2000. Contraction and Convergence: The Global
Solution to Climate Change. Green Books, on behalf of The Schumacher Society.
3. Aubrey Meyer, pers comm.