Editorial
Back to square one
Trade talks collapse as West disgraces itself again
The Doha round of negotiations at the WTO is finally dead. After seven years of often acrimonious debate and last-ditch efforts to cut a deal in Geneva, the talks were finally abandoned for good on July 29, due to irreconcilable differences between the US on one side and the G-33 group of developing countries on the other.
Once again, the sticking point was agriculture. Once again, even as they attempt mightily to put the blame for the failure on the developing countries, it was the West, specifically the US, whose intransigence and insistence on acting only in its own interest that proved an insuperable stumbling block to a deal that would reportedly have resulted in more than $130 billion a year in tariff savings.
Enough is surely enough. At this moment in time we have seen enough from the West to understand that it will continue to act globally solely in its own interests and that the continued impoverishment of the developing world is of little concern to them.
Fine, but we should at least, then, be spared the hypocrisy and sanctimony of these countries pretending to be good global citizens. In this way, at least, the slow motion breakdown of the Doha round has been instructive.
The final impasse was the demand from the G-33 which wanted special safeguard mechanisms to protect farmers in the developing world against temporary surges in cut-price imports of cotton and rice. When one considers that these safeguards would be the only thing standing between hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers and penury, to say nothing of the stability of billions throughout the developing world, it is hard to fathom the opposition.
What is really outrageous about opposition to this from the West is that it insist not only on its own tariffs but also on massive agricultural subsidies that protect its handful of farmers and massively distort the international price of goods, causing further hardship to farmers in the developing world.
The attitude of the Western countries is nothing short of a disgrace. The only good that can possibly come out of the debacle would be if the US has learned that it needs to respect the growing power of the developing world and that it cannot simply force the rest of the world into servicing its interests any more.
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