Far from being bad news for Africa, the July collapse of World Trade Organisation talks aimed at fostering a global free trade regime is actually an unexpected bonus. Out of the breakdown in negotiations should come a new trading system that is beneficial to Africa’s women, says Mohau Pheko.

The Collapse of the WTO Doha negotiations are good for Africa and women. This is an opportunity for Africa to move away from the myth that the Doha Round was a 'developmental round'. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the start, the aim of the developed countries was to push for greater market openings from the developing countries while making minimal concessions on their part. Invoking development was a cynical ploy.

The break down of the talks is a turning point for Africa to contribute to developing a multilateral trading system based on developing Africa, women's rights and sustainable development.

During July, in anticipation of the July 27-28 meeting of the World Trade Organisation's General Council, a major rescue effort was mounted to save the "Doha Round" of global trade negotiations from collapse. The most prominent of these efforts took place at the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg, where leaders of the world's most powerful economies called for a successful conclusion to the round, painting it as a “historic opportunity to generate economic growth, create potential for development, and raise living standards across the world."

The collapse of the Doha negotiations offers Africa a unique opportunity to review and reconsider the multilateral trading system as a whole, and to start with a new approach to a global trading system that will promote social and gender justice, women's empowerment and environmental sustainability. It also offers Africa some breathing space to reclaim the policy space that has been taken away in the process of negotiations.

Africa can expose the hyprocrisy of the lopsided trade in agriculture. Even if the United States had conceded to the terms of the WTO Director General's compromise on cutting its domestic support, this would still have left it with a massive US$20 billion worth of allowable subsidies. Even if the European Union had agreed to phase out its export subsidies, this would still have left it with 55 billion euros in other forms of export support. In return for such minimal concessions, the US, and EU, and other developed countries like Japan wanted radically reduced tariffs for their agricultural exports in Africa and developing country markets.

If these talks had been brought to a conclusion on such lopsided terms, it would result in African countries slashing farm tariffs while preventing them from maintaining food security. This is a recipe for massive expanded hunger and threatens to further impoverish millions of Africans.

The current deadlock was caused by developed countries, mainly the US, who were not willing or able to come up with steeper cuts in farm subsides. The collapse of the Doha negotiations creates a momentum for Africa to review the past negotiations and analyse the flaws in the WTO system in its entirety. The current neoliberal approach to the multilateral trading system subordinates the needs of African women and men to corporate-driven interests.

The bias of the Doha negotiations serves the private interests of the biggest corporations instead of benefiting the majority of Africa's people. Recent World Bank [1] and other studies such as that from the Carnegie Endowment Centre [2] highlight the fact that the current trade liberalisation agenda is not working for the majority of women and men, particularly those living in impoverished African countries, and that especially women “tend to be among the most vulnerable to adverse impacts” [3].

Trade can be a medium of development, but trade liberalisation is not a panacea to development, poverty eradication and gender equality. The time has come for Africa to take leadership and start with a new approach to a multilateral trading systems that will genuinely promote equitable, gender just and sustainable societies that benefit all women and men.

For this, international trade policy must be constrained and bound by existing international agreements that promote human rights and women's rights, ecological sustainability and human dignity and must aim to end poverty and promote well-being.

Trade policies can no longer be dictated by the interests of big corporations. Any further WTO negotiations should not undermine governments' commitments to implement domestic Bills or Rights and United Nations Conventions.

* Mohau Pheko is coordinator of the Gender and Trade Network. For Further Information: Write to: [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Notes:

[1] A series of devastating reports on the potential outcomes of the Doha Round were published by the World Bank, the UN, and several think tanks including "Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda", Kym Anderson and Will Martin et. al. World Bank Report, Nov.1, 2005

[2]"Winners and Losers: Impact of the Doha Round on Developing Countries", Sandra Polaski, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC, 2006

[3] "Global Overview Trade Sustainability Assessment of the Doha Development Agenda" from the EU, final draft report

For women on the continent of Africa, the upcoming 6the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Hong Kong in December will stand out as the apogee of failure for the globalisation project.

Women and social movements have articulated the need for economic democracy. This involves the equitable participation of all people in the ownership of the productive assets on which livelihoods depend upon.

Some of the key messages African women are sending to the Hong Kong meeting centre around research of the lived experiences of women, which indicate that agricultural trade liberalisation measures can create starvation and famine when tariff barriers are removed. These measures allow the flow of cheap food, which displaces poor women and men and destroys their entitlements.

Lowering of import barriers and flooding of the market with imported food grains sold at low prices is the result of the many levels of hidden subsidies of the rich countries. These have been shown to contribute to hunger and starvation in agricultural societies, which predominate in African countries. What the Agreement on Agriculture aims to achieve is the replacement of women and other subsistence producers with agribusiness as the main providers of food. Behind the obfuscation of terms such as ‘market access’, ‘domestic support’, is a raw restructuring of power around food: taking it away from people and concentrating it in the hands of a handful of agro-industrial interests.

The agriculture negotiations when taken up by our governments are treated as gender neutral. These discussions do not take into account the 75% contribution women make to agricultural production. They assume a common myth that separates affluence from poverty. If you produce what you consume, you do not produce. This is the basis on which the production boundary is drawn for national accounting that measures economic growth.

This myth is perpetuated in the WTO contestation and contributes to the mystification of growth and consumerism. It also hides the real processes that create poverty. The WTO agriculture negotiations are inimical to people’s interests. They have become a space for protecting the interest of agribusiness corporations and commercial farmers whose priority is not food security but profit. Their profit distribution is a monopoly. They are the sellers of inputs to farmers, the buyers of agricultural commodities from farmers, and the sellers of processed foods to consumers. Women do not see the agreement on agriculture as a conflict between farmers of the North and those of the South, but between small farmers everywhere and agribusiness multinationals. In Africa the small farmers are women, even though their role has remained invisible and has been neglected in the official trade discussions.

In the upcoming Hong Kong meeting women will fight against the free export and import of agricultural products because this translates into the destruction of small farmers and local food production capacities. By locating food in the domain of international trade, women recognise that this will dislocate its production in the household and community.

Trade liberalisation through the WTO is aimed at removing all restrictions for trade and trading interest and results in the removal of food security by removing the legal and policy instruments that protect the entitlements of poor women and men who have little to no purchasing power and are therefore excluded from the market.

African women find trade negotiations a rather strange place for products of the mind to be discussed. Yet, that is precisely what has happened. Trade and plunder merge in what is called Trade- Related Intellectual Property Right (TRIPs). This is another instrument, which will dispossess rural women of their power, control and knowledge. Land, water, forests, rivers, indigenous medicines, plants are regarded as commodities. Even more obscene women are fighting against TRIPs intention to take seeds out of the custody of women and make it private property of multinational corporations. By adding ‘trade related’ to intellectual property right, the WTO has forced issues of ownership of genetic resources and life forms on to the agenda of international trade.

The construction of ‘intellectual property’ in the WTO is linked to multiple levels of dispossession for women. The preamble of the TRIPs agreement states that intellectual property rights are recognised only as private rights. This excludes all kinds of knowledge, ideas and innovations that take place in the intellectual commons, in villages, farmers, indigenous people. TRIPs is a mechanism to privatise the intellectual commons and de-intellectualise women, so that in effect, the mind becomes a corporate monopoly. TRIPs critique by women stems from the Latin root of private property, privare, and means to deprive. The laws of private property which rose during the 15 -16th centuries eroded people’s common right to the use of forests and pastures, while creating the social condition for capital accumulation through industrialisation. These new agreements in the WTO are created to protect individual right to property as a commodity, while destroying collective rights to water, land, food, health and the basis of sustenance.

Economic democracy is fundamental to the essential and efficient functioning of economies and sound public regulation. Today’s markets respond only to money, they are obsessed with the wants of the rich and neglect the most basic needs of poor women and men. Economic democracy is a necessary foundation of individual, community, and national economic self-determination – the right to determine one’s own economic priorities and the rules of one’s economic life – because it helps secure a political voice for each person.

* Mohau Pheko is the coordinator for the Gender & Trade Network in Africa, based in Johannesburg, South Africa ([email protected])

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