By Raj Patel
When the World Trade Organization talks collapsed in Seattle in 1999, there were parties in the streets and a wailing in the corridors of power. The failure of the Doha Round of WTO talks in Geneva last week has drawn a more muted reaction from both its champions and critics.
In Seattle, it was possible to tell a story in which the voices of people on the streets mattered, in which the disenfranchised had scored a victory against an unaccountable agent for international capital. This failure had less to do with global justice, and more to do with the growing pains of international capitalism.
To the untrained eye, it's hard to tell that anything's different. Today's ducks of international capital still look, walk and quack the same. The financial markets didn't seem to care, with major indexes untroubled. In part, this is because the contribution that the Doha Round would have made to a global economy of $54 trillion, by the WTO's own generous figures, is a mere $50 billion.
Yet some countries clearly lament the collapse. In a press conference last Wednesday, Burkina Faso's trade minister, Mamadou Sanou, said, "We can hardly control our anger." And he's right to be annoyed.
As a cotton-exporting country, his farmers are being wiped out by the multimillion-dollar support that the US gives its cotton exporters, but which Burkina Faso is prohibited, under WTO rules, from doing anything about. "They wanted me to be here to negotiate on cotton. I have been here for 10 days and I haven't been able to discuss cotton," Sanou said.
For its part, the US was particularly keen to blame India and China for failing to enter into the spirit of the negotiations. Beneath the sighed pronouncements of Susan Schwab, the US trade representative, was a thinly veiled lament of "when will they learn?"
To be clear, the historical spirit of the WTO has been for developing countries to shut up and do what they're told and, if they're very good or very big, they'll get a scrap or two from the EU and US's table.
On that table was a tentative agreement between the main negotiating parties, reached in the dark of July 25 night. The EU and the US had given some ground to demands that skilled workers from Asia be allowed entry to the EU and US markets. More visas were promised, and it looked as if the deal might be sealed.
Over the weekend, though, India squirmed. Winning visas for the IT industry would keep the middle classes happy, but the majority of Indians depend on agriculture. While politicians are often happy to genuflect before a rural Mother India and then bankroll her urban sons, with an election looming they needed to do more. The government has already promised to cancel a slice of farmers' debt in a spectacular and utterly cosmetic pre-election stunt.
