WTO Talks Collapse (Again)

international | miscellaneous | other press Tuesday July 29, 2008 21:26 by not 1 of

The Guardian reports it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/29/wto.eu

It didn't require the Irish Government to use their veto as the farmers have been demanding! Larger forces were at work. China and india don't want to be flooded by cheap food imports from the US. In other words they want to maintain their own small scale agriculture and their own food security. This is spelt out by Mandelson in his blog.

Walden Bello of Focus on The Global South, and a noted ongoing critic of the WTO and neo-liberalism more generally, sees the re-localisation of agriculture (that such a collapse may make possible) as central to the mitigation of climate change.

Extracts from and links to both below.

Mandelson's blog which the article mentions is here: http://ec.europa.eu/trade/issues/newround/doha_da/genev...n.htm

Extract: "The basic problem is that the Indians, the Chinese and other defensive developing countries want the safeguard to be triggered at a level that the US thinks is too low. (These kinds of safeguards are usually in the form of a clause that only allows imports to rise at a set rate from one year to the next). Nath and the Chinese argue subsistence farmers cannot be expected to compete with large-scale commodity exporters - especially with subsidized commodity farmers in the developed world. The US counters that the Indian and Chinese notion of a safeguard is so low as to effectively block significant expansion of commodity exports. What should be relatively easy to resolve as a technical argument about the precise 'trigger' levels for the safeguard clause rapidly escalates into a political argument about the protection of subsistence farmers from trade competition and the rights and wrongs of trade distorting farm subsidies in the US."

Walden Bello: Derail Doha to Save the Climate:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/29/10673/

Extract: "There’s something surreal about the ongoing World Trade Organization talks in Geneva, which aim at coming up with a new agreement to bring down tariffs in order to expand world trade and resuscitate global growth. In the face of the looming specter of climate change, these negotiations amount to arguing over the arrangement of deck chairs while the Titanic is sinking.

Indeed, one of the most important steps in the struggle to come up with a viable strategy to deal with climate change would be the derailment of the so-called “Doha Round.”

Global trade is carried out with transportation that is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. It’s estimated that about 60% of the world’s use of oil goes to transportation activities which are more than 95% dependent on fossil fuels. An OECD study estimated that the global transport sector accounts for 20-25% of carbon emissions, with some 66% of this figure accounted for by emissions in the industrialized countries."