Poverty lobby attacks Cancun draft

By Alex Kirby BBC News Online environment correspondent

No deal would be better than a bad deal, says WDM

In a scathing indictment of the World Trade Organisation, British campaigners say a major conflict may erupt at its Mexico meeting.

They say the WTO should prepare to accept failure in Cancun rather than settle for "another fudge".

Some of their sharpest criticisms are aimed at the US and European Union. They claim the world trade system and the WTO itself are in crisis.

The broadside comes from the World Development Movement (WDM), a group with an established reputation for sober analysis of trade and poverty issues.

WDM's head of policy, Peter Hardstaff, said no deal in Cancun would be better than a bad deal for the poor people of the world.

"There are definable criteria by which success or failure in Cancun can be measured. It is not enough for the UK government just to say that any deal is better than no deal at all," he said.

"All of the talk is to schedule another ministerial meeting soon... Another fudge will not quell the growing criticism from within the WTO and from virtually every country.

Suicide mars trade summit

"The EU have come to Cancun with an impossible task. Not only are they trying to maintain their damaging regime of agriculture subsidies, they are pushing developing countries to rapidly throw open their markets to EU exports in services and industrial products.

"They are also aiming to expand the WTO's powers to cover a range of new issues. This is mission impossible. It also exposes their rhetoric of a 'development agenda' as shameless spin."

System 'in crisis'

An analysis by WDM of the draft WTO ministerial declaration, which forms the basis of negotiations in Cancun, says it "shows all the signs of a trade system in crisis. It overwhelmingly represents the positions of the major trading powers of the US and EU, all but ignoring the repeated submissions from developing countries."

WDM says there is no agreement on how to conduct negotiations on the so-called "new issues" - investment, competition, transparency in government procurement, and "trade facilitation".

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Despite a call in the last three weeks from eight African countries for negotiations not to start, it says, the EU has refused to drop the idea.

WDM says the declaration seeks to prod developing countries into more binding liberalisation of public services like water and electricity supply and more stringent rules, in the face of reluctance by some to comply.

On agriculture, it says a paper by the US and the EU is the basis of the draft, largely sidelining a submission by 17 developing countries including Brazil, China and India.

It says: "If the development rhetoric had any substance to it, this situation would have been reversed."

The Americans and the Europeans, WDM believes, plan to maintain subsidies to their own farmers "with minimal change".

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It says the EU "is doing all it can to ensure there is no commitment to phase out export subsidies, and the US seems reluctant to agree to phase out its system of export credits."

On import controls, it expects rich countries to maintain some of their own high tariffs on poor countries' agricultural goods, though the poor will be obliged to lower their own tariffs.

WDM concludes: "The draft agriculture text would severely restrict poor countries' ability to protect the livelihoods of millions of small farmers."