Patched-up, even procedural deal, in Hong Kong will be worse than failure

At the WTO Ministerial in Hong Kong for the sixth Ministerial conference, unless developing countries against pressures -- from the WTO leaders, the US-EC-Japan and their transnational corporate lobbies -- they may be setting themselves up for another highly imbalanced outcome and a more oppressive multilateral trading system.

The Doha Work Programme (DWP) and its agenda of negotiations (covered by the single undertaking) launched in November 2001 had in fact very little development content, and initial reactions at Doha was one of resistance to the EC and WTO calling it a development round. Subsequently, developing countries took up the claim, and began to press for actions to promote development. But four years of talks have produced nothing, only an apparent willingness to tackle peripheral issues.

There is a general consensus among all political economists, engaged in research and study of development, that developing countries need above all large 'Policy Space" - ability to use a wider choice of policy instruments than is currently permitted under the rules and practices of international economic organizations - in particular of the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank.

These policy choices will be no more than what today's industrialized countries used during their period of industrialization and development, but which they now want to deny to the developing world. Market access for exports of developing countries in the developed world is important, but without policy-space and ability to produce and export value added goods, market access will not become Development. (see Nancy Birdsall, Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramaniam, in Foreign Affairs July-August 2005; Richard Kozul-Wright and Paul Rayment in their forthcoming publication, where they characterize the current neo-liberal policies advocated by the IMF, World Bank and the WTO, as well as the OECD and the leading think tanks of the North, as "market fundamentalism").

From this point of view, the Doha Round of negotiations, far from providing and expanding the policy space for developing countries (constricted by the Marrakesh Treaty and its agreements) in fact has a built-in agenda to enable the industrialized world and the majors to invoke instruments that would further restrict developing country policy space.

There was some little space envisaged in the Doha work programme (as part of the single undertaking) - the Implementation issues and those relating to operationalizing the 'best endeavour' clauses of the Special and Differential Treatment provisions in the GATT, GATS and TRIPS. But even this little remain unimplemented, with the majors (and the WTO leadership) repeatedly using sophistry not to implement them in letter and spirit, but rather use that agenda to split the developing world even further.

And on present course, despite all the repetitious statements about Development being at the heart of the new round of negotiations, any outcome of these negotiations will set back Development for a few decades.

The developing countries have been virtually bombarded over the last several days and weeks, and will probably get more of it at Hong Kong, with propagandist talk of an economic disaster, for the world economy and for developing countries,