The Road From Seattle

UN Chronicle, Spring, 2000 by Ann Marie Erb-Leoncavallo

Poor nations are also concerned about the procedures of the WTO. Many trade delegates feel they are second-class members, especially after Seattle where they were excluded from key informal negotiations. They also view the membership process with suspicion. The challenge for many of these countries is adjusting to the economic openness that admission brings and carrying the administrative burden of changing so many policies in a short period of time. Some nations cannot afford to make the effort without external aid.

In his statement to the WTO meeting, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan emphasized it was up to the WTO and its members to ensure that developing countries benefit from free trade. He urged greater market access for developing-country exports in which they have a competitive advantage, such as textiles, footwear and agriculture. He also pointed out that farmers in the third world cannot compete with agricultural interests in industrialized countries, which now receive some $250 billion a year in subsidies. The benefits of reducing trade protection measures, he said, could increase exports of developing countries by "many millions of dollars per year, far more than they now receive in aid", while costing the rich countries very little. For millions of poor people, the Secretary-General argued, "this could make the difference between their present misery and a decent life". Mr. Annan also pointed out that the tariffs rich countries impose on developing countries' imports are now four times higher than the ones th ey impose on products from other industrialized countries. Therefore, he concluded, it was not surprising that many developing countries "feel they were taken for a ride". He also said it was "hardly surprising" if developing countries viewed arguments for using trade policy to advance various good causes as "yet another form of disguised protectionism".

"My own sense is that if you try to tag all these things onto trade negotiations, it is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible", Mr. Annan told journalists in December after the Seattle meeting. Instead, he argues, "corporations operating around the world need not wait for the local government to apply these standards which their own Governments have endorsed. You do not have to have a national law to pay your staff a decent salary. You do not have to wait for a national law to respect the human rights of your workers; they should do that as a matter of course."

A year before Seattle, in January 1999, Mr. Annan told business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: "We have to choose between a global market driven only by calculations of short-term profit, and one which has a human face. Between a world which condemns a quarter of the human race to starvation and squalor, and one which offers everyone at least a chance of prosperity, in a healthy environment."

In what now seems a prescient move, the Secretary-General challenged the business leaders to join a "Global Compact" with the United Nations and support international standards on human rights, labour and environmental protection, or else face increasing threats to the multilateral trading system. He explained that universal values had already been established in these areas by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the International Labour Organization's Declaration on Worker Rights, and the Rio Declaration adopted at the UN Earth Summit. "What we have to do is find a way of embedding the global market in a network of shared values", he said.