Leading up to the December 2005 World Trade Organization's (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong, Pambazuka News will examine some of the issues regarding the WTO as it affects Africa. In the first of this series, we examine the relationship between African nations and the WTO.

A coalition of African civil society organizations has formed around the upcoming WTO meetings, under the umbrella of the African Trade Network. They comprise trade unions, agricultural organizations, faith-based groups, women’s collectives and non-governmental organizations, and argue that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are seriously undermining the rights of developing nations. The World Trade Organization is complicit in taking their goals further, and is leading to economic degradation and severe violations of the needs of people in African countries. The African Trade Network argues that the WTO has done little to meet the needs of developing countries, but have acted instead to further only the interests of their economies, which are often linked to corporate interests. In a collective statement, the Declaration of African Civil Society on the Road to the 6th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization in Hong Kong, the groups that gathered in Accra, Ghana from the 16-19th of August this year, declared that the double standards of those in power are undermining the ability of African countries to develop.

There are a number of specific issues that these African countries feel is important for the WTO to pay special attention to. The decisions made surrounding these particular matters will be important for Africa and Africans.

Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA)

Negotiations in the area of non-agricultural market access will prove important at the upcoming WTO meeting, as wealthier countries will inevitably try to push through extreme reductions in tariffs, while at the same time attempting to impose restrictions on the levels to which developing countries can raise tariffs in the coming years. The NAMA talks centre around industrial goods, but also include natural resources, and the goal of these talks is to open up the economy and make access to these products easier (for wealthy countries, at least). The African Trade Network has taken as their position the demand that African countries not accept proposals on tariffs, but should instead negotiate to define and limit tariff instruments and related policies.

Agriculture

Because African’s are so dependent on agriculture for food security, development and income, this is an extremely integral area for negotiations. The African Trade Network argues that developing countries are being forced to open their markets to exports from wealthy countries, while they protect theirs. Furthermore, that wealthy countries provide subsidies to their farmers, while poor countries cannot, is indicative of just one example of inequality. The African Trade Network therefore demands that African countries take no further reductions in tariffs for agricultural products, and gain access to the right to protect domestic producers, including the right to designate special products. Wealthy countries must eliminate all subsidies which enable them to dump artificially cheap goods in countries that cannot afford to protest otherwise.

Services

Liberalization and deregulation have been long imposed on African and other developing countries, and have had the effect of transforming services, which are fundamental human rights, such as health, education and water, into private, for profit facilities. African countries must protest these human rights violations, and open up more services sectors, while at the same time committing these under the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services.

Economic Partnership Agreements

In an attempt to further WTO interests, the European Union has been bargaining with African countries around the Singapore Issues, in order to enable market access to European goods and services in Africa, which go beyond what is required of African countries according to the WTO. The so-called goal of the Economic Partnerships is to promote sustainable development and contribute to poverty eradication. These were negotiations, which began in 2002 and were aimed at redefining trade between the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP). The African Trade Network believes that to succumb to these demands would only prove detrimental to African nations, and that their governments must call for an end to the reciprocity requirements between Africa and the EU.

The very existence and processes of the World Trade Organization is contentious to many African civil society organizations. Non-transparent and undemocratic processes, as well as a general environment of exclusion from mini-ministerial meetings, has meant that wealthy countries are able to resolve controversial issues in their favour, without protest, prior to the actual ministerial. The African Trade Network therefore campaigns for a stronger, more unified African force, involving an alliance of governments, so that African concerns and needs are met in a fair and equitable manner.

* Researched and written by Karoline Kemp, Commonwealth of Learning Young Professionals Intern, Fahamu

For last weeks profile on the background to this years WTO Ministerial, see: http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=29838

A November forum will focus on the growing global phenomena of cities self-providing broadband networks for municipal and residential use. Major stakeholders including local governments and private enterprise will assemble to grapple with the many issues associated with metropolitan broadband.

Four Corners, an Australian investigative TV programme, has revealed that an Australian mining company has been implicated in a massacre of at least 100 people. According to eyewitness accounts and investigation reports obtained by Four Corners, dozens of people, mostly innocent civilians, were summarily executed by soldiers with the logistical assistance of the Australian company. The bloodbath happened in the remote south-eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As crucial World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks approach in December, concerned citizens are invited to join a mass lobby in London on 2 November 2005 to demand that the UK government supports the call to make poverty history by delivering trade justice. The lobby is being organised by the Trade Justice Movement (TJM), in partnership with the Co-operative Bank. Another mass rally is planned for Brussels on 21 November 2005.

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All the commitments made by both donors and African countries to lift the continent out of poverty will be consolidated into one action plan and monitored on an annual basis, the Department for International Development announced. The leading Group of Eight nations have pledged universal access to HIV treatment by 2010. There has also been a commitment to set a date for the ending of export subsidies, which will give poor countries a fairer trading environment with the west. Anti-malarial drugs and treated mosquito nets will be available to 85% of Africans vulnerable to malaria by 2015. Meanwhile, African nations have pledged to undergo a review of democratic processes once every two years.

The UK's Department For International Development's new aid conditionality policy stresses that developing countries need to be equal partners in determining how aid is spent, and in setting specific goals on which aid disbursement will be conditional. A new report from Mokoro critiques the policy, arguing that the conditions are not being consistently applied or understood between countries, and lack clarity on the particular 'triggers' for aid disbursement or withdrawal.

More than 70 education ministers and high-ranking officials responsible for education will meet during UNESCO's General Conference in Paris (7-8 October) to explore practical ways to address Education for All challenges by building on positive examples from different parts of the world. The Round Table will be opened by Koochiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO. The case for education as a human right, tool of personal empowerment and means for cultural development will be reaffirmed.

There will be as many as 50 million environmental refugees in the world in five years' time. That is the conclusion of experts at the United Nations University, who say that a new definition of "environmental refugee" is urgently needed. They believe that already environmental degradation forces as many people away from their homes as political and social unrest.

Military aid to Uganda should be tied to human rights performance in order to stem numerous human rights violations by both the military and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), says Human Rights Watch (HRW). 'It will be good for governments that give Uganda military aid of any kind, especially the United States, to tie such aid to human rights performance,' said Jemera Rone of HRW.

Under the direct supervision of the UNIFEM Program Coordinator for North Africa, based in Rabat, Morocco and in close consultation with the Morocco Ministry of Finance and Privatisation, the Project Manager will manage the Morocco Component of the Global Gender Responsive Budgeting Programme, Phase II.

The EU has pledged to increase its aid to Africa by $10bn (£6bn) to $30bn (£17bn) in the next five years, BBC News reports. The move comes after talks between the head of the EU's executive branch with his counterpart from the African Union in Brussels. The EU's new aid strategy would make Africa its top priority. However, it depends on EU leaders being able to agree their next long-term budget - something they have so far been unable to do.

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Trade union representatives from the clothing, textiles, footwear and leather sector from Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Madagascar, Mauritius, Namibia, Tanzania, Nigeria, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa met in Cape Town on the 10th and 11th of October to discuss the effects of the Multi-fibre Arrangement (MFA) phase out and its effect on the future of the African textiles, clothing and leather industries. The meeting was facilitated by the International Textile Garment & Leather Workers' Federation's Africa Region (ITGLWF-Africa). The representatives concluded that the African continent has lost more than 250 000 jobs over the past few years, resulting in more than a million African family-members having lost the stable source of their livelihood.

"Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they're tremendous tools of freedom of expression. Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest." Reporters without Borders has released a handbook for Bloggers and cyber-dissidents, which is available from the link provided.

Who should have control of the Internet? www.theregister.co.uk has released two podcasts
that deal with the power struggle over who should have control of the internet. Part one covers the shock announcement by the EU for a new body to run the Internet. Part two reflects on why others want US control removed.

The fifth annual MIT Technology Review Emerging Technology Conference kicked off with a presentation from Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. Negroponte discussed his $100 laptop initiative, in which he is working to produce a low-cost laptop for mass distribution. But www.knowprose.com says the initiative is complete hype: "We wouldn't want to shake things up at all with open hardware. Oh no, that would shift power structures. That's what's been holding back the Simputer and similar initiatives."

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2. We, Southern and Northern people's movements and organizations, agree to work together to promote international recognition of the peoples and countries of the South as social, ecological, cultural and financial creditors of the North. We demand that Northern governments recognize these debts, caused by policies of plunder in violation of human rights, including the right to sovereignty and self-determination.

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For Tony Blair, Africa needs saving - nowhere more so than Sierra Leone, limping out of civil war. But China sees Africa as a proving ground for its "go global" policy, sending burgeoning private companies across the world to create new multinational corporations. Nearly 700 Chinese companies operate in 49 African countries. Chinese trade with Africa will reach $30bn next year - triple the level five years ago.