[asia-apec 300] FOCUS-on-APEC#9 Part I

[gonzalo]

FOCUS-on-APEC 
______________________________________________________
A regular bulletin produced by Focus on the Global South 
(FOCUS) Bangkok, Thailand

Number 9, December 1996 / January 1997

FOCUS was designated the NGO Information/Monitoring Center 
on APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum) by the 
participants of the 1995 NGO  Forum on APEC in Kyoto, Japan.  
It was out of this commitment that FOCUS-on-APEC was created.  
FOCUS-on-APEC carries APEC-related news, the latest items of 
interest and concern, and informed and critical analysis from a 
progressive perspective -- with a broad geographical concentration 
on East Asia and the Western and South Pacific.

FOCUS-on-APEC is where you can learn about other people's 
APEC-related work and they can learn about yours. Please send us 
your APEC-related information (by e-mail, fax or snail-mail!) -- 
including news items, research papers, opinion pieces and 
information on grassroots activities happening in your respective 
country. Your contributions will be incorporated into the bulletins.

We welcome your comments and suggestions!

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CONTENTS:
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-  REGIONAL ANALYSIS
	-  The Big Chill in Singapore
	-  APEC and WTO: The Washington Connection
	-  Ceasefire in Singapore
-  REGIONAL ROUNDUP
	-  The Manila People's Forum: An Exciting, Exhilarating 	
	    Process
	-  Declaration: Manila PeopleÕs Forum on APEC
	-  The WTO Singapore Ministerial Conference: The 	  	  
	    Beginning of the End?
-  ANNOUNCEMENTS 
	-  Conference: Alternative Security Systems in the Asia 	  
	    Pacific Region
	-  Book Launched at Manila PeopleÕs Forum on APEC 	      
	    Now Available!
	-  Watch Out for the Next Issue of Focus-on-APEC!
______________________________________________________
REGIONAL ANALYSIS

The Big Chill in Singapore

by Walden Bello*

It was an historic meeting, alright, but not for the reason often cited 
by the trade epresentatives of Northern countries:  that the World 
Trade Organization's recently concluded First Ministerial Meeting 
in Singapore represented a milestone in the consolidation of a "fair, 
equitable and more open rule-based system" of global trade.

As a representative of one of the relatively few public interest 
NGOs present at the WTO Ministerial, the Singapore experience 
left me with two very strong impressions:
1) Despite the new name, the WTO pretty much functions like the 
old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).  Who 
determines which issues are vital and sets the agenda is largely the 
so-called "Quad" group, made up of the United States, European 
Union, Japan, and Canada.  

Consensus is said to be the operative decision-making norm for this 
127-member institution, which is absurd on the face of it.   

In fact, in such a large body, what consensus means is principally 
consensus among the Quad, whose members then apply a variety 
of mechanisms to get the less powerful countries to agree to 
positions arrived at by the Quad.  As US trade expert C. Fred 
Bergsten candidly puts it, the WTO "does not work by voting.   It 
works by consensus arrangement which, to tell the tuth, ismanaged 
by four--the Quad: the United States, Japan, European Unon, and 
Canada.  These countries ghave to agree if any majorsteps are going 
to be made, that is true.  But no votes."

The last time a formal vote was taken in GATT was in 1959, and 
the WTO is not likely to break this tradition.

Singapore was a  a striking example of Quad power to set the 
agenda.  Most of  the  127 member-country that came to Singapore 
expected that issues having to do with the implementation of the 
27,000-page GATT Uruguay Round Accord would dominate the 
agenda.  

Many of the least developed countries wanted to focus on such 
issues as problems encountered in meeting their commitments to 
the Round, the slow pace in the reduction of domestic support and 
export subsidies in agriculture in the European Union and the 
United States, and the absence of significant reductions in quotas 
on textile exports from the developing countries imposed by 
Europe and the United States.

Instead, Northern priorities overwhelmingly dominated the five-
day meeting.  For the most part, negotiations centered on an 
Information Technology Agreement (ITA) and so-the so-called 
"new issues"--"core labor standards," investment, and competition 
policy--dominated the five-day meeting.  Acting US Trade 
Representative Charlene Barshefsky set the tone in her speech the 
very first day when she said that concluding an ITA was the US'  
top priority for the meeting.  In the view of Third World country 
delegates, this hardly came as a surprise since the US accounts for 
50 per cent of the global IT market and would stand to reap a large 
part of the gains from a worldwide zero-tariff agreement.

Barshefsky at her last press conference also gave an insight into the 
dynamics of the meeting when she admitted that "the core labor 
standards issue dominated the last three days of the meeting."  This 
was a case of a mainly domestic agenda overrunning global 
priorities, since the intent was to pacify a domestic constituencies 
that were fearful that free trade was leading to job losses in the US.

And in all cases, the North got what it wanted.  Massive lobbying 
produced an ITA endorsed by IT giants US, EU, and Japan, and 25 
other countries.  Despite some wording concessions to the South, 
the North was able to mention the issue of  observance of "core 
labor standards"--feared by many in the South as a a future 
rationale for disguised protectionism--pretty high up in the 
Ministerial Declaration, as item no. 4. In addition to establishing 
working groups to study transparency  in government procurement 
(codewords for corrupt practices in Third World country 
procurement policies) and competition policy, the Declaration also 
agreed to set up a working group "to examine the relationship 
between trade and investment."  To many developing countries and 
newly industrializing countries, this was a significant step towards 
making investment, in addition to trade, an area of WTO authority.

In contrast, the so-called "Plan of Action" for the Least Developed 
Countries" that was trumpeted by the WTO bureaucracy as a 
signal effort to address the problems of the poor countries failed to 
mention any concrete offer from any of the developed countries of 
tariff-free access for least-developed-country products. 

2) The WTO Ministerial Conference  is an extremely non-
transparent body.  

NGO's complained about their ability to monitor the decision-
making process.  So did many official delegates, particularly from 
developing countries, for whom participation was a real problem.  
Like the old GATT, formal plenaries in the Ministerial were 
devoted to speech-making, while the real decision-making was 
reserved for informal meetings of country delegations that were 
handpicked on a far from transparent basis.  In these informal 
sessions, realpolitik and confusion reigned.  

As an NGO bulletin noted, "Most discussions took place in 
informally convened meetings and the meetings of Heads of 
Delegations (HOD) became a sounding chamber to measure the 
degree of resistance to positions agreed behind closed doors.  One 
NGO even reported that some delegates relied on NGO contacts to 
keep them up to speed on what was happening and where.  One 
delegate said the seats of power at the negotiations were also 
exclusively found in informal negotiations."

Reacting to complaints about transparency and democracy, the 
Chairman of the Conference, Singapore's Yeo Cheow Tong, stated 
that the invitations to informal consultations had been issued on 
the basis of "region," "size," and "development status."  What he 
failed to mention was who did the choosing.

The WTO Ministerial Meeting could have been an opportunity for 
the North to respond to the stresses and strains visited on the 
South by the process of trade and broader economic liberalization, 
of which the WTO is now the key agent.  Instead, the dominant 
Quad countries chose to approach the organization in the 
traditional way of making it an instrument to blatantly push a 
global trading agenda that would principally benefit them.  For 
most of the Southern delegates, the Singapore experience underlined 
what they had suspected all along: that the WTO was no different 
from their old nemesis, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and 
the World Bank.

In this connection, the speech that probably made the lasting 
impression on Third World delegates was not WTO Director 
General Renato Ruggiero's "vision speech" in which he talked about 
free trade resulting in "a phone in every village" but that of Michel 
Camdessus, the IMF's Managing Director.

"With the globalization of the world economy," Camdessus told 
the delegates, "trade has become more complex, and trade 
liberalization, more challenging.  We are fortunate to have the forum 
and machinery established under the WTO to help move the 
process forward.

"The IMF, for its part," he continued, "will join in this task 
through its surveillance and support of members' adjustment and 
reform efforts.  I am pleased to note that our joint efforts can now 
proceed in the legal framework of the Cooperation Agreement that 
the Director General, Mr, Ruggiero, and I will sign here in 
Singapore.  In addition, I understand that the World Bank's 
Executive Board has approved the WTO/World Bank Cooperation 
Agreement.  

"Thus," he concluded, "the stage is set for the WTO, the Fund, and 
the World Bank to work together toward the implementation of our 
complementary objectives.  I have no doubt that our Member 
countries will encourage our efforts and play their full part in 
helping achieve these fundamental objectives fot the common good 
of mankind."

A vision of world economic governance was being layed out, and to 
most delegates from the South, it was a chilling one.


*Dr. Walden Bello is co-director of Focus on the Global South, a 
program of Chulalongkorn University's Social Research Institute, 
and a professor of sociology and public administration at the 
University of the Philippines. 
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