Change from Within?

On 8th June 2002, the World Development Movement held an extraordinary debate between Dr. Supachai Panitchpakdi - the next Director General of the WTO, Martin Khor - Director of Malaysia-based and highly influential campaign group Third World Network, and Mohau Pheko of the the Gender and Trade Network based in South Africa. What follows is an edited transcript of the debate.

Dr. Supachai: Even before I was involved with the race for the Director General position of the World Trade Organisation, I knew that we needed to bring a different sense of direction to the WTO. I recognised that need from my dealings with GATT and the World Trade Organisation when I was first in charge of the international economic policies of my own country over fifteen years ago. But I learned a lot while campaigning for the Director General's post. It was after the Uruguay round, so we were in the midst of the implementation of those commitments. I talked a lot at that time about the need to assess the consequences of the past round. Has it created new markets for the countries around the world? Has it created enough employment? Has it created more diversification of products? Has it created more value-added for some of the primary products? Has it created more processed foods and things like that? I thought it might be useful to have answers to these questions so that we know where we're heading and would not repeat past mistakes.

However, you'll be surprised to hear that many people warned me not to talk about assessment of the round. They said that when you asked such questions it means that you want to unravel the existing commitments in the eyes of the trade negotiators. It appeared I would be talking along the lines of those who want to actually avoid commitments and unravel the whole agreement. But I have repeated the message now, with the right kind of explanation, because I do need to know consequences. People like to quantify the trade rounds by saying that there will be trillions of US dollars of new trade created. But I do not think that is good enough. I want answers to different questions. If you talk about the newly created volume of trade, how is it distributed? How can it be translated into terms of the number of jobs created? How can it be translated into terms of giving new opportunities for countries to diversify their products? I make it clear that when you talk about the so-called 'development angle', you don't talk just about dollars and cents, you talk about the real products, you talk about the real gains and you talk about employment rates.

Beyond the Statistics

This is also vital because the moment you start to look beyond financial figures, you will find out that there are great shortcomings with statistics. In many countries, even in some advanced countries in Asia, there are no statistics that link trade with employment rates. So when I discuss trade and development, I don't want to say anything that would be seen to be denigrating the trading negotiators but I certainly would like to see more policy issues being debated.

Now some time ago I looked at the so-called Slater Report which Martin must have seen. The Slater Report is a report that has been commissioned by the WTO Secretariat to look into the restructuring needs of the WTO. One of the things that has been suggested by the Slater Report was the re-orientation of the Secretariat to act not only as facilitators of trade talks but also to provide policy options. I intend to invite more debates in these areas because I think the WTO is more than just a place where you negotiate only on tariff or non-tariff issues. You also need to discuss and understand the policy issue of trade. This is what I hope to be bringing with me to Geneva, to try to make people understand the sense of what they are negotiating about. To make them appreciate that trade negotiation is not only about creating more trade volumes, it's about taking account of the distribution and quality of the trade volume.

Helping LDCs

The second issue that I would like to address is that we must now face the fact that we have not tackled the issue of least developed countries (LDCs). I was interviewed on Newsnight recently and we talked a bit about the LDC's but they just edited it out. I was told that was because they had to include an item about the World Cup which is of utmost importance. I realise that but I felt a little bit sorry because the interviewer asked me how LDCs would benefit from the trade round because they have seen no benefit so far. I said they are going to gain something because we are going to address their issues. They may not have the capacity to negotiate but we have to do something on their behalf. We need to ask for concessions on their behalf and make those concessions binding not voluntary. So the concessions from the European Union should be something which would be standard for the LDC's. They will not need to negotiate for full access for their products free from tariff and free from quotas. That should be granted to them and there should not be any exceptions.

Currently, there are three things that are still kept out and these three things are of great importance. Rice is important for Asian nations, sugar is very important for the South Americans, and bananas are very important for some African and some Caribbean countries. Three major commodities are being kept out, and this must be altered by the advanced countries. But such changes must also apply to the developing countries. There are advanced developing countries and less advanced developing countries. The more advanced developing countries should also be able to afford to give special market access and concessions to the least well-off countries.

There are also the areas of South Asia, the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa that need special attention. When we discuss special and differential treatment in relation to these areas I hope that we will be more extensive than in the past. It's not only to do with the time frame that lower income countries are subjected to. We may also need to discuss the unique attributes of certain areas and recognise that they need special treatment in terms that might be seen to be contradicting or violating some of the existing approaches.

Achieving Coherence

The third issue that I raised during my campaign and it has become part of the Doha statement, which is the so-called 'coherence issue'. I really can't remember people talking emphatically about coherence issues until three or four years ago. People went and did their own thing. The World Bank did their own development work. The IMF did their own financial work and so on and so forth. But I talked about coherence because I know that if you really want to address trade globalisation in a way that allows us to harness free trade for the benefits of the whole world, we cannot only tackle the trade issue per se. The WTO needs at least to have the World Bank working alongside us. In the last few years, I have spent lots of time working with many different organisations. I think we need to do more of this sort of coherence working, not only at the level of having the heads of organisations meeting each other at dinners once or twice every year but we also need the rank and file of the institutions to meet. They need to understand each other - they have to know and appreciate each other's work.

Supporting The Secretariat

The fourth issue is the issue of the WTO Secretariat itself. Here we have 540 people working as hard as they can under very trying circumstances. And I'm not talking here about the pleas to increase salaries of all these people. I'm not talking even about my own salary. I'm talking about the equipment and resources we need. I am talking about equipping the World Trade Organisation to help countries to be better prepared for trade negotiations in the future. To do this the countries and the Secretariat need more resources, they need more research funds, they need more staff. We might need more legal officers, we might even need more economists to understand trade policies better.

Completing Doha

The fifth issue is how to treat the new round, the so-called Doha development agenda (DDA) in a way that will allow it to serve each and everyone. Of course I am not here to discuss the content of the DDA, it would take hours of discussion, interesting though it might be. I have to see to it that this DDA is completed successfully for everyone. But if you look at all the conditions around the DDA, the time frame, the number of issues, the difficult positions of some countries or the procrastination in some areas of negotiations, I am not so sure whether the deadlines will be met.

For example the deadline for implementation by the end of this year is to me a very important deadline because implementation will be one of the major, one of the earliest stumbling blocks in our negotiations. If the developing countries don't see advances to be made in the areas of implementation I don't think they would be encouraged to go on with the negotiations.

I think we also need to make much, much more headway with our discussions on agriculture because agriculture is an old issue. Agriculture has been debated ad nauseam so I don't think we would need years or even months. We know the issues and I think if the political will is there, we should reach certain agreement on agriculture way before March 2003 when we can all agree upon the modalities and things like that.

So I'm trying to emphasise the fact that the Doha round is a chance to put in as much development effort as we can. But the conditions around the DDA are not easy. Much as we would like to see DDA as a complete proposal, it is not a complete proposal. It's a proposal that is contingent upon the negotiations to be carried out in Mexico next year. So I think we need to work very hard to make developing countries understand, to make each and every one understand how far we can go with the discussions on the new rules, how far the new rules could be beneficial for all of those who would be involved with this discussion. We also need a sense of urgency, we need countries, particularly the advanced countries to realise at all times that the development issue is not just semantic. This is a discussion on substance, when it comes to substance you need concession, you need sacrifices. So I hope that when it comes to the negotiations in Mexico, we will see sacrifices coming from the advanced countries to make the round a genuine development round.

Martin Khor: I am especially happy and excited to share the same panel with Dr. Supachai, his presentation was excellent. There is so much hope from all the good people in the world that is now placed on his shoulders.

We both come from the same part of the world - South East Asia. We have seen the ups and downs of globalisation. A lot of the benefits of globalisation that are talked about actually accrue, unfortunately, to only a very few developing countries, especially Thailand and Malaysia. We did benefit a lot from trade and from investment. Maybe it's because the kind of policies and frameworks that were implemented there were implemented appropriately. However, we did not succeed so well on the financial side and that's why we had a crisis. So there are costs and benefits, it's something that we do understand in our part of the world. So we are very proud that Dr. Supachai is going to take over as Director General; from our point of view, maybe three years delayed. If we had a proper decision-making process system in the WTO maybe it would have been dealt with three years earlier.

Dr. Supachai is of course an economist and it's very rare to be an economist and be in the WTO, there are very few economists in the WTO Secretariat so you are very bold to say that we can create a good economic stream in the WTO and to bring policy issues into the heart of the negotiations and discussions. It's so important because as we know the WTO currently resembles a bargaining house for companies who want to make this profit and get that market and so on. But the larger macro picture of the economic consequences of the rules and proposals being put forward, in terms of social consequences and jobs are more important because these policy implications are actually enshrined in the constitution of the WTO in the Marrakech Agreement.

The WTO's Purpose

You will be shocked to see in Paragraph 1 of that agreement that the objectives are to raise living standards, to create employment, to develop the developing countries and to meet the objectives of sustainable development. Only Paragraph 4 talks about trade globalisation but then only as an instrument and as a means, it is not the objective, to be carefully used where needed to service the goal of sustainable development. Trade globalisation is not the sacred principle and goal - a point that is often misunderstood particularly by developed country diplomats. They always talk about the core principles of the WTO being non-discrimination but this is not so at all. The core principle of the WTO is sustainable development, raising living standards and providing employment and I was very happy to hear Dr. Supachai just now stressing the need to assess existing agreements and any proposals according to these concrete goals of employment, balance of payment stability, creation of new opportunities in terms of diversification of economies of developing countries and so on. These are the concrete results that not only us as non-governmental organisations (NGO) want to see but also the policy-makers in developing countries and particularly the man, the woman and the child on the street, the farmers, the workers, the consumers and so on.

Beyond Reciprocal Agreements

Dr. Supachai, I want to respond to the four or five points you made. Firstly, you talked about the need for assessing the impact of trade rounds. I think this is very important, we want to assess, not to put blame either on the Northern negotiators who are so clever in getting what they wanted in the round or to blame the policy makers and negotiators of the South who were so ignorant that they signed an unbalanced agreement. We want to, as you say, learn from the past mistakes so that we don't repeat them and maybe learn from the past mistakes so that we can also correct those mistakes.

The WTO is at least supposed to be reciprocal but that is not good enough. It should be more than reciprocal in the sense that poorer countries and poorer people should get more than they can offer. This is the principle of affirmative action which is the hallmark of any civilisation. But, in reality, the WTO is not even reciprocal. For example the TRIPS Agreement benefits only one party at the expense of another. I shared a forum with someone from the World Bank two weeks ago and he actually has costed that the developing countries are losing $60 billion a year from the implementation of the TRIPS Agreement. He asked why developing countries don't crunch the figures before they negotiate because if you crunch the figures, you find that they are not reciprocal. But the trouble is that the negotiators don't crunch the figures because they are negotiators, they are not economists. This is the point which Dr. Supachai made - we need the economic analysis and the calculations of cost and benefits.

So I think the NGO's like us here, the campaigners, are very concerned about two things. The benefits didn't come to developing countries not because of loopholes in the agreements on textiles and agriculture but because the costs of implementing TRIPS and the liberalisation of agriculture were actually higher than they had anticipated. Even if developing countries do get market access, few of them can take advantage because the majority do not have the capacity to be able to produce and export. Even if you get everything but arms exports at zero tariff, very few countries can really take good advantage.

The other concern is that if the new agreements come into being on investment, competition and procurement, it is quite simple to see that again they are not reciprocal. Very few developing countries have firms that can invest in the United States or Europe but the reverse is true. It will be the developed economies and maybe a few developing countries that will have access to procurement especially if competition follows the European Union definition giving the big foreign firms the right to compete equally in the local market. Governments will lose the right to be able to give benefits, advantages or encouragement to local firms because it will be judged discriminatory against the big foreign firms. It will lead to a monopolisation of developing country economies by the big corporations in the name of competition.

Rethinking Liberalisation

Secondly, I think we need to rethink the whole practice of globalisation. In theory it is very good, if we could all liberalise and take advantage of it. But in practice countries that are too weak will not be able to withstand competition. If these countries liberalise, great damage will be done to their agricultural, banking and manufacturing sectors. We need to rethink the timing, the sequencing, and the rate of liberalisation and allow each country to be able to make its own decision according to its own conditions. At the moment too much pressure is put on these countries by the IMF and the World Bank to accept the wrong conditions while developed countries use the WTO to force acceptance of binding agreements on the rate and level of liberalisation. We have to lift the pressure off the developing countries so that they have more freedom.

Thirdly, the proposal made by Dr. Supachai that we actually analyse each agreement and proposal according to their consequences for employment, GNP growth, capacity-building and the balance of payments. This is very important. In fact, I think the studies that some of us have made show that the present binding rules and commitments of the WTO today are not economically sustainable nor viable in terms of the need to develop local economies. The majority of developing countries are suffering from increasing trade deficits because their imports have grown tremendously due to globalisation commitments but their exports have not increased correspondingly due to falling commodity prices or due to the fact that their market access is still blocked, particularly in agriculture or due to their lack of supply capacity. So if this situation continues, then they will not be able to have the foreign exchange to continue to import, they will go heavily into debt and the trading system itself will suffer.

Enlightened Self-interest

Fourthly, countries need to consider their own enlightened self-interest rather than narrow self- interest. We expect companies to look at their narrow self-interest but we expect policy makers, particularly of the developed countries to look at their long-term enlightened self- interest. Not only the need to be compassionate to other countries, not only the need to allow other countries to develop so that we have global peace and prevent terrorism but also for pure economic reasons. If the big companies of the North take over the economies of the South by exporting to them because the local producers have all collapsed, as the Chinese representative said at the Singapore Ministerial many years ago, "You will win a temporary and illusory victory because for two or three years you will be able to have your products swamp our markets but by the third or fourth year we won't have the foreign exchange to continue to buy your products, we won't have an economy left so you will have reduced demand in the end".

Similarly if foreign companies take over a large part of the economy in developing countries, there will be political unrest and the governments that allowed it will be thrown out of office and the foreign companies that would like to invest there will not be able to make the profits they hoped for. So even for simple economic reasons, it would be in the enlightened self- interest of developed countries to encourage the growth of the domestic economies of the South.

Reforming WTO Decision-Making

Fifthly, we have the issue of the decision-making process in the WTO and the role of the Secretariat. The great majority of developing country governments and of course almost all NGO's that I talk to are very disgruntled by the lack of transparency and their lack of participation in the WTO. Now we don't expect to go into small negotiating group discussions like at the United Nations, but certainly NGOs should be allowed some participation at the General Council of the WTO. For example, twenty or thirty NGO's should be allowed - half from the South, half from the North. This is something that we could be considering and looking at.

But more importantly our Ministers and our Ambassadors need to have the right to participate in the WTO and very often they are denied the right through manipulative processes where only a few countries are allowed to take part and the rest have to take it or leave it. This still takes place, particularly around ministerial meetings. We need a Secretariat that is neutral, that takes a leadership role in policy issues on behalf of all members. And since the majority of members are from developing countries, their interests and their needs have to be at the centre of the WTO negotiations - something that has been endorsed by Doha.

We hope that Dr. Supachai when he takes over will be able to shift the role of the Secretariat to be one that is neutral and works on behalf of the majority of countries which means it has to be pro-development. Technical assistance should be country-driven and not donor-driven. It should not be an exercise in which the donors make use of technical assistance to brainwash the developing countries into policies that the donors themselves want.

Finally, we should turn the WTO around to become a pro-development organisation. If sustainable development is the ultimate objective, then all the existing rules and the new proposals put forward should be assessed according to the development principle. Whatever is distorting development should not be accepted. Non-distortion of development should be the primary principle, rather than non-distortion of trade.

As I said I don't envy Dr. Supachai. So much hope is placed on his shoulders. We hope that he will be up to it and Dr. Supachai please be assured that the NGO's will be behind you fully if you do the right thing.

Mohau Pheko: There's a song that is sung in every language in many places of worship in Africa, it goes 'Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, I once was lost but now I'm found, was blind but now I see' and it's a song that has been sung with many variations of the theme around the world and so as we look at Doctor Supachai I hope that the wretch - the WTO - which has been lost and blind will now see.

It is obvious we need a new discourse around the WTO, a discourse that indeed does take us back to trade as an instrument of development because this is an agenda that has seemingly fallen-off the plate of the WTO. As an African woman it is not accidental that Africa is examining its position in the world and exploring methods and frameworks that can save it from its current position. We want to move from powerlessness to become empowered nations that really participate within the WTO and the trading structures of the world as equal partners at the table.

When Africa went through its independence explosion in the early 1960s, its greatest desire was self-determination, the right to govern ourselves, the right to plot our destiny and the right to bring back public services, bring back education, bring back all the things that colonialism had taken away from our country. Today when we look at the WTO, we see it has become an instrument opposed to what we wanted when we struggled for self-determination. The linkage that brings about this situation is a historical one that manifests itself in the continuing structures of domination of the African people through the collusion of yes, our leaders in many instances with the neo-colonial and the neo-liberal ideology and instruments which are dominating the WTO today.

We hear Clare Short, that nice Minister of yours telling us that globalisation is good for the poor but I really want to challenge this notion that we need to be a globalised continent. Africa is already part of the global economy, it requires no further rules or agreements of trade to join the global economy. In fact, I can state with great confidence that Africa is the most open part of the global economy. It's marginalisation does not lie in its being excluded from the global economy but in being the most exploited in the global economy.

One of the key objectives of the World Trade Organisation is development. But what does it mean to have free trade where there are inequalities of power, inequalities of decision- making, inequalities of benefits of trade. Today as we speak, in almost every area of the world public services are under attack, being commodified and sold to the highest bidder, in this case the multi-national corporations. The corporate take-over of the public services such as water, electricity, health care, telecoms and a whole range of other very necessary public services in many of our countries are things that are enshrined in our constitutions as rights. Now how do rights become commodified within the WTO and then get thrown back at us as agreements that are supposed to benefit us?

GATS is one of the most insidious agreements because of its capacity to destroy the access, the affordability and the quality of services, regardless of the efficiency arguments that we're constantly bombarded with by the private sector everywhere. It tramples on the labour rights of women who are not only users of these services but also workers in the services area. The take-over by the corporates through the rules of the World Trade Organisation is a big scandal. Every single media organisation should be talking about this scandal because it entrenches the marginalisation of those who do not have. The poor cannot become just a little clause somewhere in our agreements. If trade is supposed to bring about development, we need an agenda that is going to place people not corporate power at the centre of the agenda.

We need a new discourse around international trade that shows us what we have gained through the WTO and an assessment of what the social movements, the people's movements and civil society have been demanding. Dr. Supachai, this must happen my friend, it really must happen, in particular for the least developed countries who have lost more than they have benefited from the system and stand to lose even more under the new round.

The developing world, Africa specifically needs this issue of special and differential treatment which is being ignored, needs to be brought back into the agenda. The WTO rules on the agreement on agriculture compromise food security. It's amazing that there is a Food Summit that is going to be happening in Rome with people talking about how many more people are going to be poor in the world, how many people are going to not eat and yet we have enough food for everybody to eat in the world. The agreement on agriculture contradicts food security, it contradicts the ability and the right for people to eat. We have to re-think this, not only just re-think it, we have to think about moving it out of the WTO as a non-trade issue.

What people in social movements also want to see is a firm stand on TRIPS. If you say that TRIPS really does give us the right to provide the sort of public health that we need, then let us not subject it to all these different interpretations of what came out of Doha. We can't have all these different interpretations of what that clause actually meant that came out of Doha. HIV-Aids is our reality in Africa, we can't wish it away, we can't continue to use rules to stop people receiving the right to health care. For us it is a life and death issue, it is not this tinkering with clauses and agreements that make people better, it is medicine, it is good health care that brings health to people.

Self-determination is the greatest challenge that Dr. Supachai faces. A self-determination that brings the weaker, marginalised and excluded players into the WTO that inherently has excluded them and denied countries the right to self-determine their own development, to self-determine the delivery of public services, to self-determine how food is going to be brought into their communities, to self-determine what areas investors should be or should not be allowed to come and invest in.

Somebody asked me once what it feels like to meet the WTO? I say: what does it feel like to constantly make demands that change the livelihoods of people and to be told you need to make more concessions and further liberalise to join the club that benefits? What does it feel like to lose control of your services, to have bio-pirates steal from your land and patent what belongs to you and sell it back to you as theirs? What happens when they tell you to be more competitive, investor friendly and allow others to procure from your government? What happens when the movement of people is not allowed from South to North? What happens when you lose your ability to talk to your people about the WTO, when you have to be like a secret lover, keeping those nice agreements as if they were secret love letters that nobody else is allowed to read but me? What happens when you have no voice in the WTO and somebody speaks on your behalf and they say a lot of things that you don't even recognise?

If trade is an instrument of development, then the WTO ought to be reconstructed into an organisation that does not sustain a new liberalism but creates an atmosphere of self- determination that allows countries to really bring development into their countries.

Audience Questions

- I wonder how Dr. Supachai feels he will be able to resist the pressure put upon him by corporate lobbies and developed country governments.

- WTO talks much about costs for companies in many of the agreements but very rarely talks about social costs. I wonder whether that was going to be built in at any time. In addition, when will the WTO address the imbalance that allows companies the greatest flexibility but places the maximum restriction on the ability of workers to sell their labour around the world?

- Dr. Supachai, the current Director of the WTO said recently that the WTO's core business is trade liberalisation. Martin reminded us that according to the Marrakech Declaration the core business is sustainable development. What do you see as the WTO's core business?

Dr. Supachai: With regards to the question about the pressure coming from the corporate sector, I do feel that, I do feel that. As Martin has alluded to the former negotiations on TRIPS, that was one of the glaring examples of the pressure coming from the corporate sector on governments that ultimately resulted in some agreements being forced upon countries. We have to try to prevent that.

Now it is not for me to go and intervene in that matter but it is for me to try to help people to understand and to educate people how to deal with this kind of pressure. On health issues such as drugs, for example, I have tried to talk to drug firms around the world. Following insistence by some of my friends in the US administration I got to see a number of them and we had a long discussion. My suggestion to them was that they should come to Geneva and I would try to organise a meeting between their representatives and the Ambassadors in Geneva. I think we need to hear both sides and we need to hear very clearly. We need to let the drug firms speak-up instead of letting them speak only to their own governments and through their governments. We also need to have participation from other Ambassadors, from other countries in Geneva so that we can have a decent dialogue.

I also plan to introduce some sort of a code of conduct which is something that I'm not getting support for from countries around the world, particularly some advanced countries. They feel that are we trying to intervene too much in the movement of corporate sectors. But what I'm trying to suggest is that while we are trying to implement a new regime, new agreements, new rules for countries to abide by, we don't seem to have any rules for the trans-national corporations. I have made suggestions several times, that I propose a framework that I would work out with other organisations like the OECD or the World Bank or the UN. They have their own codes of conduct for some areas of trans-national corporate activity but I would deal specifically with trade areas. So you will be hearing more of this but let me give you a warning that I have had some negative comments that indicate that some countries are not really in agreement with this kind of effort.

I would also try to organise some groups of enlightened corporate sectors. We have to find people who will work with me. We can ask donor countries, institutions, and international agencies to work in some of the poor areas but I think the private sector should also undertake some work. And I hope you will be able to monitor their work. If they are sincere they should help because they have a responsibility not only to gain in terms of profits from those countries but also to put something back..

In the areas of social costs, again I would say the WTO cannot deal with everything. Economic cost maybe we can deal with, social costs we will be dealing with in this new work programme. We will be talking about trade and environment and I would try to see to it that there is a harmonisation between all the environmental agreements dealing with trade issues around the world - there are more than 200 of them. But please be aware that some countries are using environmental agreements or social standards as a means to block trade and poorer countries have been hurt by this abuse of so-called non-tariff barriers.

We will be discussing labour mobility in this our programme but it's in the GATS so we may have to work much harder on the explanation of what the GATS contains and try to inform the developing countries what sort of demands they must make so that they will not be losers again in the GATS negotiation.

The last question on the core business of the WTO. Of course I am saying this at my own risk because I am going to be there only for a few years and the constitution of the WTO is well spelt out: it's actually what Martin Khor just said, it's not trade per se, it's not trade liberalisation per se, it covers the whole area of policies that have to do with trade. Again it's not also only trade and development, it's the quality of life, it's the upgrading, raising of living standards, it's the gainful employment that will have to be created through trade, it's the returns to be made from the specialisation in the division of labour.

So it's actually a lot to do with international economic policies as I see it, it's this that I'm trying to inject. Of course I cannot do this on my own. I have already suggested to the Chairman of the General Council that we should have a retreat so that we can discuss some future directions of the WTO with Ambassadors. This is not my area of responsibility because it's the area for the members, for the Ambassadors. But I have already asked for this retreat for which I could get an invitation to attend so that we can have a discussion on the long-term core directions of the World Trade Organisation and I would like to inject a sense of international economic policies that would serve to enhance the opportunities for countries to partake as beneficially as possible in the global economic growth process.

Mohau Pheko: I think that what we've been asking alongside the social movements is: how do we strategically move through this process? Obviously within the movement there are going to be people who want to engage and tinker with the text and try to get a declaration that reflects what people want, there are those who are going to want us to totally de-link from the WTO. There are those who feel that we should engage with government and engage with all the processes and try to lobby through them and I think that it's important to recognise that all these processes are important, including those who want to just throw stones at the WTO itself. But we are all quite clear that the one thing that we need to do is to really analyse the whole neo-liberal framework, not just in the WTO but even at our own national level economic policies which breed and also promote a lot of what is happening at the global level and endorse it. So what I am saying is that it's a process but there is growing disillusionment within the movement that this whole process of trying to tinker with the issues and just get crumbs off the table is not very worthwhile unless we reconstruct the WTO itself to really begin to respond to us as people.

Martin Khor: I think the central point in the WTO is power. The trading system was created as a rich man's plum, there were very few developing countries originally. Even when they came in they were not active and it has remained a rich man's club, even though the majority are from the developing countries. They have tried now to assert their own identity and their own rights but the few countries that started it still want to retain the old habits of this rich man's club where they meet every day, they decide among themselves, they may even quarrel among themselves but the moment they make a decision, then they go on a political campaign to win over some of the developing countries and even those that they can't win over, they will try to ride roughshod over with the tremendous assistance of the Director General and the Secretariat. That's the secret of the WTO. The Secretariat is controlled by these few countries and they have always tried to make sure that their interests are entrenched in the staff and leaders of the Secretariat.

In the lead-up to Doha, the developing countries and the Africans in particular came to the conclusion that they did not want the new issues being proposed for negotiation. They even coined the term 'the need for a development agenda' instead of a development round and this development agenda they define as resolving the problems of the past and not allowing the new issues to enter. So when they went to Doha, Pascal Lamy and others took on the language of the development agenda and said 'You want a development agenda, this is what we will adopt' and now they call it the Doha Development Agenda. But all the African countries, the majority of Asian countries, almost all the Caribbean countries, failed to prevent the new issues being put forward for negotiation at Doha. The Director General was requested to write a letter explaining that in all these areas there were differences of views. He did not write that letter.

So when the text went to Doha, the developing countries were at a grave disadvantage but even up to the last day, the morning of the fifth day, the majority of the developing countries said they could not accept the start of negotiations. I even have the historic statement made by the LDC's. They said 'We cannot begin a negotiation, we can only continue to study the issues'. So what was done? They extended the meeting for another 24 hours, none of us know how that decision was taken, it wasn't in the general hall. By that time forty Ministers had left because it was an extra day and then on the last night, only twenty countries were invited to the final negotiation. A Ugandan delegate who tried to get in was asked to leave, the Zimbabwean Minister was not invited but he bashed his way in, he said 'I'm going to come in' then when he went in, they said 'Sir, there is no chair for you to sit on', he said 'Never mind, I do see an empty chair, I'm going to sit on it' but he was told that he could not speak.

But the role the European Union and the United States played in badgering those countries that still did not agree is only half of the story. The other half is that the Director General did a lot of the negotiations and a lot of the bullying. He bullied and shouted at some of the Ministers. This whole thing is now recorded in a study that is about to come out, it's done by Focus on the Global South. It is a very shameful record, it could never happen in a United Nations Conference.

So Dr. Supachai could do something about the Secretariat. The Director General is meant to be neutral. I don't think it's up to Dr. Supachai to decide whether the new issues go in or not, but he could do something about the Secretariat. If the Secretariat becomes neutral, it doesn't have to take the side of the developing countries, just be neutral. That would be a tremendous achievement already. But a lot is at stake, there are so many statistics available on how local industries have been wiped out in Africa. 70% of manufacturing jobs lost in Ghana and so on. We have so many studies now on how the agricultural sector in developing countries are being wiped out.

And on TRIPS we know how many millions are dying from lack of access to medicine and services. I can tell you we are meant to be able to choose when we liberalise but we are under tremendous pressure. I've seen the services demands from the European Union to Malaysia, it is quite devastating. We have a last chance to save the multilateral trading system. I am not so interested in saving the WTO but we can save the multilateral trading system together. There is still this chance, if there is some semblance of democracy in the WTO, if the Secretariat is more neutral. If Dr. Supachai pushes ahead on all these things that he is talking about, we could even turn the WTO around. But a lot will be up to us as NGO's to put pressure on our own governments to do something. The future of the WTO actually depends on the people in this audience here more than it depends on Dr. Supachai on Mohau or on myself.

Placed on Fabian Global Forum, June 2002.