Why Reform of the WTO is the Wrong Agenda
By Walden Bello*
In the wake of the collapse of the Seattle Ministerial, there has emerged the
opinion that reform of the WTO is now the program that NGOs, governments, and
citizens must embrace. The collapse of the WTO Ministerial is said to provide
a unique window of opportunity for a reform agenda. Cited by some as a
positive sign is United States Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky's
comment, immediately after the collapse of the Seattle Ministerial, that "the
WTO has outgrown the processes appropriate to an earlier time." An increasing
and necessary view, generally shared among the members, was that we needed a
process which had a greater degree of internal transparency and inclusion to
accommodate a larger and more diverse membership." (1)
Also seen as an encouraging gesture is UK Secretary of State for Trade and
Industry Stephen Byers' recent statement to Commonwealth Trade Ministers in
New Delhi that the "WTO will not be able to continue in its present form.
There has to be fundamental and radical change in order for it to meet the
needs and aspirations of all 134 of its members." (2)
These are, in our view, damage control statements and provide little
indication of the seriousness about reform of the two governments that were,
pre-Seattle, the stoutest defenders of the inequalities built into the
structure, dynamics, and objectives of the WTO. It is unfortunate that they
are now being cited to convince developing countries and NGOs to take up an
agenda of reform that could lead precisely to the strengthening of an
organization that is very fundamentally flawed. What civil society, North and
South, should instead be doing at this point is radically cutting down the
power of the institution and reducing it to simply another institution in a
pluralistic world trading system with multiple systems of governance.
Is the WTO Necessary?
This is the fundamental question on which the question of reform hinges.
World trade did not need the WTO to expand 17-fold between 1948 and 1997,
from $124 billion to $10,772 billion. (3) This expansion took place under the
flexible GATT trade regime. The WTO's founding in 1995 did not respond to a
collapse or crisis of world trade such as happened in the 1930's. It was not
necessary for global peace, since no world war or trade-related war had taken
place during that period. In the seven major inter-state wars that took place
in that period-the Korean War of 1950-53, the Vietnam War of 1945-75, the
Suez Crisis of 1956, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War,
the 1982 Falklands War, and the Gulf War of 1990-trade conflict did not
figure even remotely as a cause.
GATT was, in fact, functioning reasonably well as a framework for
liberalizing world trade. Its dispute-settlement system was flexible and with
its recognition of the "special and differential status" of developing
countries, it provided the space in a global economy for Third World
countries to use trade policy for development and industrialization.
Why was the WTO established following the Uruguay Round of 1986-94?
Of the major trading powers, Japan was very ambivalent, concerned as it was
to protect its agriculture as well as its particular system of industrial
production that, through formal and informal mechanisms, gave its local
producers primary right to exploit the domestic market. The EU, well on the
way of becoming a self-sufficient trading bloc, was likewise ambivalent,
knowing that its highly subsidized system in agriculture would come under
attack. Though demanding greater access to their manufactured and
agricultural products in the Northern economies, the developing countries did
not see this as being accomplished through a comprehensive agreement enforced
by a powerful trade bureaucracy but through discrete negotiations and
agreements in the model of the Integrated Program for Commodities (IPCs) and
Commodity Stabilization Fund agreed upon under the aegis of UNCTAD in the
late seventies.
The founding of the WTO served primarily the interest of the United States.
Just as it was the US which blocked the founding of the International Trade
Organization (ITO) in 1948, when it felt that this would not serve its
position of overwhelming economic dominance in the post-war world, so it was
the US that became the dominant lobbyist for the comprehensive Uruguay Round
and the founding of the WTO in late eighties and early nineties, when it felt
that more competitive global conditions had created a situation where its
corporate interests now demanded an opposite stance.
Just as it was the US's threat in the 1950's to leave GATT if it was not
allowed to maintain protective mechanisms for milk and other agricultural
products that led to agricultural trade's exemption from GATT rules, so was
it US pressure that brought agriculture into the GATT-WTO system in 1995. And
the reason for Washington's change of mind was articulated quite candidly by
then US Agriculture Secretary John Block at the start of the Uruguay Round
negotiations in 1986: "[The] idea that developing countries should feed
themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure
their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are
available, in most cases at much lower cost."(4) Washington, of course, did
not just have developing country markets in mind, but also Japan, South
Korea, and the European Union.
It was the US that mainly pushed to bring services under WTO coverage, with
its assessment that the in the new burgeoning area of international services,
and particularly in financial services, its corporations had a lead that
needed to be preserved. It was also the US that pushed to expand WTO
jurisdiction to the so-called "Trade-Related Investment Measures" (TRIMs) and
"Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs)." The first sought to
eliminate barriers to the system of internal cross-border trade of product
components among TNC (transnational corporations) subsidiaries that had been
imposed by developing countries in order to develop their industries; the
second to consolidate the US advantage in the cutting-edge
knowledge-intensive industries.
And it was the US that forced the creation of the WTO's formidable
dispute-resolution and enforcement mechanism after being frustrated with what
US trade officials considered weak GATT efforts to enforce rulings favourable
to the US. As Washington's academic point man on trade, C. Fred Bergsten,
head of the Institute of International Economics, told the US Senate, the
strong WTO dispute settlement mechanism serves US interests because "we can
now use the full weight of the international machinery to go after those
trade barriers, reduce them, get them eliminated."(5)
In sum, it has been Washington's changing perception of the needs of its
economic interest groups that have shaped and reshaped the international
trading regime. It was not global necessity that gave birth to the WTO in
1995. It was the US's assessment that the interests of its corporations were
no longer served by a loose and flexible GATT but needed an all-powerful and
wide-ranging WTO. From the free-market paradigm that underpins it, to the
rules and regulations set forth in the different agreements that make up the
Uruguay Round, to its system of decision-making and accountability, the WTO
is a blueprint for the global hegemony of Corporate America.
It seeks to institutionalize the accumulated advantages of US corporations.
Is the WTO necessary? Yes, to the United States. But not to the rest of the
world. The necessity of the WTO is one of the biggest lies of our time, and
its acceptance is due to the same propaganda principle practised by Joseph
Goebbels: if you repeat a lie often enough, it will be taken as truth. Can
the WTO Serve the Interests of the Developing Countries? But what about the
developing countries? Is the WTO a necessary structure--one that, whatever
its flaws, brings more benefits than costs, and would therefore merit efforts
at reform?
When the Uruguay Round was being negotiated, there was considerable lack of
enthusiasm for the process by the developing countries. After all, these
countries had formed the backbone of UNCTAD, which, with its system of
one-country/one-vote and majority voting, they felt was an international
arena more congenial to their interests. They entered the Uruguay Round
greatly resenting the large trading powers' policy of weakening and
marginalizing UNCTAD in the late seventies and early eighties. Largely
passive spectators, with a great number not even represented during the
negotiations owing to resource constraints, the developing countries were
dragged into unenthusiastic endorsement of the Marrakesh Accord of 1994 that
sealed the Uruguay Round and established the WTO. True, there were a few
developing countries in the Cairns Group, a group of developed and developing
agro-exporting countries, that took an active role in pushing the WTO in the
hope that this would improve market access to their agricultural products in
the North, but they were a small minority.
To try to sell the WTO to the South, US propagandists evoked the fear that
staying out of the WTO would result in a country's isolation from world trade
("like North Korea") and stoked the promise that a "rules-based system" of
world trade would protect the weak countries from unilateral acts by the big
trading powers.
With their economies dominated by the IMF and the World Bank, with the
structural adjustment programs pushed by these agencies having as a central
element radical trade liberalization, much weaker as a bloc owing to the debt
crisis compared to the 1970's, the height of the "New International Economic
Order," most developing country delegations felt they had no choice but to
sign on the dotted line.
Over the next few years, however, these countries realized that they had
signed away their right to employ a variety of critical trade measures for
development purposes.
In contrast to the loose GATT framework, which had allowed some space for
development initiatives, the comprehensive and tightened Uruguay Round was
fundamentally anti-development in its thrust. This is evident in the
following:
Loss of Trade Policy as Development Tool
In signing on to GATT, Third World countries were committed to banning all
quantitative restrictions on imports, reduce tariffs on many industrial
imports, and promise not to raise tariffs on all other imports. In so doing,
they have effectively given up the use of trade policy to pursue
industrialization objectives. The way that the NICs, or "newly
industrializing countries," made it to industrial status, via the policy of
import substitution, is now effectively removed as a route to
industrialization.
The anti-industrialization thrust of the GATT-WTO Accord is made even more
manifest in the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs) and
the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). In their
drive to industrialize, NICs like South Korea and Malaysia made use of many
innovative mechanisms such as trade-balancing requirements that tied the
value of a foreign investor's imports of raw materials and components to the
value of his or her exports of the finished commodity, or "local content"
regulations which mandated that a certain percentage of the components that
went into the making of a product was sourced locally.
These rules indeed restricted the maneuvering space of foreign investors, but
they were successfully employed by the NICs to marry foreign investment to
national industrialization. They enabled the NICs to raise income from
capital-intensive exports, develop support industries, bring in technology,
while still protecting local entrepreneurs' preferential access to the
domestic market. In Malaysia, for instance, the strategic use of local
content policy enabled the Malaysians to build a "national car," in
cooperation with Mitsubishi, that has now achieved about 80 per cent local
content and controls 70 per cent of the Malaysian market. Thanks to the TRIMs
accord, these mechanisms used are now illegal.
The Restriction of Technological Diffusion Like the TRIMs agreement, the
TRIPs regime is seen as effectively opposed to the industrialization and
development efforts of Third World countries. This becomes clear from a
survey of the economic history not only of the NICs but of almost all
late-industrializing countries. A key factor in their industrial take-off was
their relatively easy access to cutting-edge technology: The US
industrialized, to a great extent by using but paying very little for British
manufacturing innovations, as did the Germans. Japan industrialized by
liberally borrowing US technological innovations, but barely compensating the
Americans for this. And the Koreans industrialized by copying quite liberally
and with little payment US and Japanese product and process technologies.
But what is "technological diffusion" from the perspective of the late
industrializer is "piracy" from that of the industrial leader. The TRIPs
regime takes the side of the latter and makes the process of
industrialization by imitation much more difficult from hereon. It represents
what UNCTAD describes as "a premature strengthening of the intellectual
property system...that favours monopolistically controlled innovation over
broad-based diffusion."(6)
The TRIPs regime provides a generalized minimum patent protection of 20
years; increases the duration of the protection for semi-conductors or
computer chips; institutes draconian border regulations against products
judged to be violating intellectual property rights; and places the burden of
proof on the presumed violator of process patents. The TRIPs accord is a
victory for the US high-tech industry, which has long been lobbying for
stronger controls over the diffusion of innovations.
Innovation in the knowledge-intensive high-tech sector-in electronic software
and hardware, biotechnology, lasers, opto-electronics, liquid crystal
technology, to name a few-has become the central determinant of economic
power in our time. And when any company in the NICs and Third World wishes to
innovate, say in chip design, software programming, or computer assembly, it
necessarily has to integrate several patented designs and processes, most of
them from US electronic hardware and software giants like Microsoft, Intel,
and Texas Instruments. (7) As the Koreans have bitterly learned, exorbitant
multiple royalty payments to what has been called the American "high tech
mafia" keeps one's profit margins very low while reducing incentives for
local innovation.
The likely outcome is for a Southern manufacturer simply to pay royalties for
a technology rather than to innovate, thus perpetuating the technological
dependence on Northern firms. Thus, TRIPs enables the technological leader,
in this case the United States, to greatly influence the pace of
technological and industrial development in rival industrialized countries,
the NICs, and the Third World.
The Watering Down of the "Special and Differential Treatment" Principle
The central principle of UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development)-an organization disempowered by the establishment of the WTO--is
that owing to the critical nexus between trade and development, developing
countries must not be subjected to the same expectations, rules, and
regulations that govern trade among the developed countries. Owing to
historical and structural considerations, developing countries need special
consideration and special assistance in levelling the playing field for them
to be able to participate equitably in world trade. This would include both
the use of protective tariffs for development purposes and preferential
access of developing country exports to developed country markets.
While GATT was not centrally concerned with development, it did recognize the
"special and differential status" of the developing countries. Perhaps the
strongest statement of this was in the Tokyo Round Declaration in 1973, which
recognized "the importance of the application of differential measures in
developing countries in ways which will provide special and more favourable
treatment for them in areas of negotiation where this is feasible."(8)
Different sections of the evolving GATT code allowed countries to renegotiate
tariff bindings in order to promote the establishment of certain industries;
allowed developing countries to use tariffs for economic development and
fiscal purposes; allowed them to use quantitative restrictions to promote
infant industries; and conceded the principle of non-reciprocity by
developing countries in trade negotiation. (9) The 1979 Framework Agreement
known at the Enabling Clause also provided a permanent legal basis for
General System of Preferences (GSP) schemes that would provide preferential
access to developing country exports. (10)
A significant shift occurred in the Uruguay Round. GSP schemes were not
bound, meaning tariffs could be raised against developing country until they
equalled the bound rates applied to imports for all sources. Indeed, during
the negotiations, the threat to remove GSP was used as "a form of bilateral
pressure on developing countries."(11) SDT was turned from a focus on a
special right to protect and special rights of market access to "one of
responding to special adjustment difficulties in developing countries
stemming from the implementation of WTO decisions."(12) Measures meant to
address the structural inequality of the trading system gave way to measures,
such as a lower rate of tariff reduction or a longer time frame for
implementing decisions, which regarded the problem of developing countries as
simply that of catching up in an essentially even playing field.
STD has been watered down in the WTO, and this is not surprising for the
neoliberal agenda that underpins the WTO philosophy differs from the
Keynesian assumptions of GATT: that there are no special rights, no special
protections needed for development. The only route to development is one that
involves radical trade (and investment) liberalization.
Fate of the Special Measures for Developing Countries Perhaps the best
indicators of the marginal consideration given to developing countries in the
WTO is the fate of the measures that were supposed to respond to the special
conditions of developing countries. There were three key agreements which
promoters of the WTO claimed were specifically designed to meet the needs of
the South:
* The Special Ministerial Agreement approved in Marrakesh in April 1994,
which decreed that special compensatory measures would be taken to counteract
the negative effects of trade liberalization on the net food-importing
developing countries;
* The Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, which mandated that the system of
quotas on developing country exports of textiles and garments to the North
would be dismantled over ten years;
* The Agreement on Agriculture, which, while "imperfect," nevertheless was
said to promise greater market access to developing country agricultural
products and begin the process of bringing down the high levels of state
support and subsidization of EU and US agriculture, which was resulting in
the dumping of massive quantities of grain on Third World markets.
What happened to these measures?
The Special Ministerial Decision taken at Marrakesh to provide assistance to
"Net Food Importing Countries" to offset the reduction of subsidies that
would make food imports more expensive for the "Net Food Importing Countries"
has never been implemented. Though world crude prices more than doubled in
1995/96, the World Bank and the IMF scotched an idea of any offsetting aid by
arguing that "the price increase was not due to the Agreement on Agriculture,
and besides there was never any agreement anyway on who would be responsible
for providing the assistance."(13)
The Agreement on Textiles and Clothing committed the developed countries to
bring under WTO discipline all textile and garment imports over four stages,
ending on January 1, 2005. A key feature was supposed to be the lifting of
quotas on imports restricted under the Multifiber Agreement (MFA) and similar
schemes which had been used to contain penetration of developed country
markets by cheap clothing and textile imports from the Third World. Developed
countries retained, however, the right to choose which product lines to
liberalize when, so that they first brought mainly unrestricted products into
the WTO discipline and postponed dealing with restricted products till much
later.
Thus, in the first phase, all restricted products continued to be under
quota, as only items where imports were not considering threatening-like felt
hats or yarn of carded fine animal hair--were included in the developed
countries' notifications. Indeed, the notifications for the coverage of
products for liberalization on January 1, 1998 showed that "even at the
second stage of implementation only a very small proportion" of restricted
products would see their quotas lifted. (14)
Given this trend, John Whalley notes that "the belief is now widely held in
the developing world that in 2004, while the MFA may disappear, it may well
be replaced by a series of other trade instruments, possibly substantial
increases in anti-dumping duties." (15)
When it comes to the Agreement on Agriculture, which was sold to developing
countries during the Uruguay Round as a major step toward providing market
access to developing country imports and bringing down the high levels of
domestic support for first world farming interests that results in dumping of
commodities in third world markets, little gains in market access after five
years into developed country markets have been accompanied by even higher
levels of overall subsidization-through ingenious combinations of export
subsidies, export credits, market support, and various kinds of direct income
payments.
The figures speak for themselves: the level of overall subsidization of
agriculture in the OECD countries rose from $182 billion in 1995 when the WTO
was born to $280 billion in 1997 to $362 billion in 1998! Instead of the
beginning of a New Deal, the AOA, in the words of a former Philippine
Secretary of Trade, "has perpetuated the unevenness of a playing field which
the multilateral trading system has been trying to correct. Moreover, this
has placed the burden of adjustment on developing countries relative to
countries who can afford to maintain high levels of domestic support and
export subsidies."(16)
The collapse of the agricultural negotiations in Seattle is the best example
of how extremely difficult it is to reform the AOA. The European Union
opposed till the bitter end language in an agreement that would commit it to
"significant reduction" of its subsidies. But the US was not blameless. It
resolutely opposed any effort to cut back on its forms of subsidies such as
export credits, direct income for farmers, and "emergency" farm aid, as well
as any mention of its practice of dumping products in developing country
markets.
Oligarchic Decision-Making as a Central, Defining Process
Is the system of WTO decision-making reformable? While far more flexible
than the WTO, the GATT was, of course, far from perfect, and one of the bad
traits that the WTO took over from it was the system of decision-making.
GATT functioned through a process called "consensus." Now consensus responded
to the same problem that faced the IMF and the World Bank's developed country
members: how to assure control at a time that the numbers gave the edge to
the new countries of the South. In the Fund and the Bank, the system of
decision-making evolved had the weight of a country's vote determined by the
size of its capital subscriptions, which gave the US and the other rich
countries effective control of the two organizations.
In the GATT, a one-country one-vote system was initially tried, but the big
trading powers saw this as inimical to their interests. Thus, the last time a
vote was taken in GATT was in 1959. (17) The system that finally emerged was
described by US economist Bergsten as one that "does not work by voting. It
works by a consensus arrangement which, to tell the truth, is managed by
four- the Quads: the United States, Japan, European Union, and Canada."(18)
He continued: "Those countries have to agree if any major steps are going to
be made, that is true. But no votes. (19)
Indeed, so undemocratic is the WTO that decisions are arrived at informally,
via caucuses convoked in the corridors of the ministerials by the big trading
powers. The formal plenary sessions, which in democracies are the central
arena for decision- making, are reserved for speeches. The key agreements to
come out of the first and second ministerials of the WTO-the decision to
liberalize information technology trade taken at the first ministerial in
Singapore in 1996 and the agreement to liberalize trade in electronic
commerce arrived at in Geneva in 1998-were all decided in informal backroom
sessions and simply presented to the full assembly as faits accompli.
Consensus simply functioned to render non-transparent a process where
smaller, weaker countries were pressured, browbeaten, or bullied to conform
to the "consensus" forged among major trading powers.
With surprising frankness, at a press conference in Seattle, US Trade
Representative Charlene Barshefsky, who played the pivotal role in all three
ministerials, described the dynamics and consequences of this system of
decision-making:
"The process, including even at Singapore as recently as three years ago, was
a rather exclusionary one. All meetings were held between 20 and 30
keycountries... And that meant 100 countries, 100, were never in the
room...[T]his led to an extraordinarily bad feeling that they were left our
of the process and that the results even at Singapore had been dictated to
them by the 25 or 30 privileged countries who were in the room."(20)
Then, after registering her frustration at the WTO delegates' failing to
arrive at consensus via supposedly broader "working groups" set up for the
Seattle ministerial, Barshefsky warned delegates: "...[I] have made very
clear and I reiterated to all ministers today that, if we are unable to
achieve that goal, I fully reserve the right to also use a more exclusive
process to achieve a final outcome. There is no question about either my
right as the chair to do it or my intention as the chair to do it...."(21)
And she was serious about ramming through a declaration at the expense of
non-representativeness, with India, one of the key developing country members
of the WTO, being "routinely excluded from private talks organized by the
United States in last ditch efforts to come up with a face-saving deal."(22)
In damage-containment mode after the collapse of the Seattle Ministerial,
Barshefsky, WTO Director General Mike Moore, and other rich country
representatives have spoken about the need for WTO "reform." But none have
declared any intention of pushing for a one-county/one-vote majority
decision-making system or a voting system weighted by population size, which
would be the only fair and legitimate methods in a democratic international
organization. The fact is, such mechanisms will never be adopted, for this
would put the developing countries in a preponderant role in terms of
decision-making.
Should One Try to Reform a Jurassic Institution?
Reform is a viable strategy when the system is question is fundamentally fair
but has simply been corrupted such as the case with some democracies. It is
not a viable strategy when a system is so fundamentally unequal in purposes,
principles, and processes as the WTO. The WTO systematically protects and the
trade and economic advantages of the rich countries, particularly the United
States. It is based on a paradigm or philosophy that denigrates the right to
take activist measures to achieve development on the part of less developed
countries, thus leading to a radical dilution of their right to "special and
differential treatment." The WTO raises inequality into a principle of
decision-making.
The WTO is often promoted as a "rules-based" trading framework that protects
the weaker and poorer countries from unilateral actions by the stronger
states. The opposite is true: the WTO, like many other multilateral
international agreements, is meant to instututionalize and legtimize
inequality. Its main purpose is to reduce the tremendous policing costs to
the stronger powers that would be involved in disciplining many small
countries in a more fluid, less structured international system.
It is not surprising that both the WTO and the IMF are currently mired in a
severe crisis of legitimacy. For both are highly centralized, highly
unaccountable, highly non-transparent global institutions that seek to
subjugate, control, or harness vast swathes of global economic, social,
political, and environmental processes to the needs and interests of a global
minority of states, elites, and TNCs.
The dynamics of such institutions clash with the burgeoning democratic
aspirations of peoples, countries, and communities in both the North and the
South. The centralizing dynamics of these institutions clash with the efforts
of communities and nations to regain control of their fate and achieve a
modicum of security by deconcentrating and decentralizing economic and
political power. In other words, these are Jurassic institutions in an age of
participatory political and economic democracy.
Building a More Pluralistic System of International Trade Governance
If there is one thing that is clear, it is that developing country
governments and international civil society must not allow their energies to
be hijacked into reforming these institutions. This will only amount to
administering a facelift to fundamentally flawed institutions. Indeed,
today's need is not another centralized global institution, reformed or
unreformed, but the deconcentration and decentralization of institutional
power and the creation of a pluralistic system of institutions and
organizations interacting with one another amidst broadly defined and
flexible agreements and understandings.
It was under such a more pluralistic global system, where hegemonic power was
still far form institutionalized in a set of all encompassing and powerful
multilateral organizations that the Latin American countries and many Asian
countries were able to achieve a modicum of industrial development in the
period from 1950-70. It was under a more pluralistic world system, under a
GATT that was limited in its power, flexible, and more sympathetic to the
special status of developing countries, that the East and Southeast Asian
countries were able to become newly industrializing countries through
activist state trade and industrial policies that departed significantly from
the free-market biases enshrined in the WTO.
The alternative to a powerful WTO is not a Hobbesian state of nature. It is
always the powerful that have stoked this fear. The reality of international
economic relations in a world marked by a multiplicity of international and
regional institutions that check one another is a far cry from the propaganda
image of a "nasty" and "brutish" world. Of course, the threat of unilateral
action by the powerful is ever present in such a system, but it is one that
even the powerful hesitate to take for fear of its consequences on their
legitimacy as well as the reaction it would provoke in the form of opposing
coalitions.
In other words, what developing countries and international civil society
should aim at is not to reform the WTO but, through a combination of passive
and active measures, to radically reduce its power and to make it simply
another international institution coexisting with and being checked by other
international organizations, agreements, and regional groupings. These would
include such diverse actors and institutions as UNCTAD, multilateral
environmental agreements, the International Labor Organization (ILO),
evolving trade blocs such as Mercosur in Latin America, SAARC in South Asia,
SADCC in Southern Africa, and ASEAN in Southeast Asia. It is in such a more
fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world with multiple checks and
balances that the nations and communities of the South will be able to carve
out the space to develop based on their values, their rhythms, and the
strategies of their choice.
*Walden Bello, PhD, is executive director of Focus on the Global South and
professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the
Philippines. He attended all three WTO ministerials as an NGO delegate.
He is the author of several works on the WTO including Iron Cage: The WTO,
the Bretton Woods Institutions, and the Third World (Bangkok: Focus on the
Global South, 1999).
1. Press briefing, Seattle, 2 December 1999.
2. Quoted in "Deadline Set for WTO Reforms," Guardian News Service, Jan. 10,
2000.
3. Figures from World Trade Organization, Annual Report 1998: International
Trade Statistics (Geneva: WTO, 1998), p. 12.
4. Quoted in "Cakes and Caviar: The Dunkel Draft and Third World
Agriculture," Ecologist, Vol. 23, No. 6 (Nov-Dec. 1993), p. 220.
5. C. Fred Bergsten, Director, Institute for International Economics,
Testimony before US Senate, Washington, DC, Oct. 13, 1994.
6. UNCTAD, Trade and Development Report 1991 (New York: United Nations,
1991), p. 191.
7. See discussion of this in Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in
Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (San Francisco: Institute for
Food and Development Policy, 1990), p. 161.
8. Quoted in John Whalley, "Special and Differential Treatment in the
Millennium Round," CSGR Working Paper, No. 30/99 (May 1999), p 3.
9. Ibid., p. 4.
10. Ibid., p. 7.
11. Ibid., p. 10.
12. Ibid., p. 14.
13. "More Power to the World Trade Organization?", Panos Briefing, Nov. 1999,
p. 14.
14. South Center, The Multilateral Trade Agenda and the South (Geneva: South
Center, 1998), p. 32.
15. John Whalley, Building Poor Countries' Trading Capacity CSGR Working
Paper Series (Warwick: CSGR, March 1999)
16. Secretary of Trade Cesar Bautista, Address to 2nd WTO inisterial,
Geneva, May 18, 1998.
17. C. Fred Bergsten, Director, Institute for International Economics,
Testimony before the US Senate, Washington, DC, Oct. 13, 1994.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Press briefing, Seattle, Washington, Dec. 2, 1999
21. Ibid.
22. "Deadline Set for WTO Reforms," Guardian News Service, 10 January 2000
