| Subject: |
'WTO members likely to clash at Kenya meeting' |
|
NEW DELHI: Trade experts, economists, politicians and activists came together here on Tuesday to express deep worry over the prospects of the Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to be held in Nairobi, Kenya next week. Various issues at the biannual meet key to India's struggling economy like food subsidies, market access to industrial goods, pharma patents, 'green' technologies etc. are likely to cause discord among WTO member countries, broadly on the lines of rich versus poor.
At the Convention where a host of people's organisations and academics had gathered, the presence of Murli Manohar Joshi, BJP stalwart and former Union minister, and representatives from BJP affiliated trade unions sent a ripple of excitement. Joshi, recounting his opposition to the WTO since its inception in the early nineties, said that consumerism and blind exploitation of natural resources were the lynchpins of Western economic model which they want to impose on everybody else, including India. He took a dig at "bullet trains and Smart Cities", both proposals of the present Modi government, as being part of this model. Representatives of Congress and Left parties also spoke.
Biswajit Dhar, professor at JNU and an expert on global trade negotiations said that the WTO itself was being sought to be subverted by developed countries forcing for consideration issues that serve their own interests. These include investment, competition policy, e-commerce, global value chains and even government procurement.
In 2001, international trade negotiations entered a new round at a meeting in Doha. A Doha Development Agenda was adopted that included some accommodation of developing countries' concerns for discussion. Since then, for the past 14 years, country representatives have struggled to arrive at an elusive consensus, mainly because the rich bloc wants to break down trade barriers including subsidies and support systems for the poor in developing countries.
But, as Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at JNU pointed out at the Convention, US is going to give farmers subsidies worth $12 billion according to the new Farm Bill which became law in 2014.
"For India, they want to calculate food subsidy costs on the basis of foodgrain prices in 1986 - that's a ludicrous position," she asserted.
S P Shukla who was India's chief negotiator at GATT, the precursor to WTO, recounted how India had fought to keep the country's - and the developing world's - interests protected in long negotiations. However, he lamented that the political dispensation over the years had steadily lost ground and compromised the country's interests, allowing the rich countries more and more leeway in the economy.
Several examples of India losing out under the WTO regime were given at the meet. These included the Information Technology Agreement (ITA-1) which made India eliminate tariffs on more than 200 IT products. This led to the complete decimation of India's electronics hardware industry. The new patent regime is also slowing down the generic pharma industry in the country. Bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTA) too have not been conducive to India, experts pointed out, giving examples of fall in food and light manufacturing products due to the FTA with ASEAN, and the rising import of steel due to FTAs with South Korea and Japan.
Prabhat Patnaik, economist and formerly at JNU, explained how opening up the Indian agriculture sector to foreign capital is a prize the West is eagerly awaiting. Patnaik said that the already deep agrarian crisis with dropping calorific intake, farmers' suicides and rural poverty, would be aggravated immensely by such a move.
The Convention issued a declaration calling for reorientation of the government's stand on trade negotiations, a Parliamentary assessment of the impact of 20 years of WTO and FTA determined policies, and a rethink on all harmful commitments. It also called for more openness in these matters.
Source : timesofindia.indiatimes.com
|