I haven’t been blogging very much since I got to Hong Kong, because I have been running around like a mad thing instead – trying to attend as many sessions (and protests) as possible. However, today I am feeling too exhausted to keep running around so much and so I thought that I would do a quick update.
The biggest news for the week is the proposed Annex C of GATS (the General Agreement on Trade in Services). Annex C was drafted during the last two months by countries and large corporations who stand to benefit the most from the liberalization of services (e.g. the EU, US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Vivendi, Suez, etc.). Disappointed in the low number of bilateral request-offers under the current GATS agreement (ie the number of services sectors that countries have been willing to autonomously liberalise under GATS), these countries and corporations have written this text in an attempt to ensure that liberalization happens rapidly and across many sectors at once.
The main sections of this annex that are really scary are paragraphs 2 and 7. Together these paragraphs introduce plurilateral and sectorial negotiations on services (ie, a group of countries could approach a small country are ask them to open up negotiations on liberalizing their education or water system). The other thing that is included in paragraph 7(b) is a mandatory element to these requests. The paragraph states that when requested, parties “shall” negotiate – meaning that a country would not be allowed to refuse a request to negotiate over the liberalization of their services. This is significant, because whenever these negotiations have gone ahead, most countries have ended up being pressured into liberalization – and this would be compounded when the negotiations become plurilateral rather than bilateral.
Now, despite the fact that only a small group of countries had drafted this text, and the fact that the rest of the member states of the WTO had been very clear that they did not agree with the text, it was brought to the Ministerials as the ONLY text to be discussed during negotiations. The only concession that was made to this fact was that the text was placed in brackets, to indicate that there was no consensus on it as yet.
An alternative text was then written by the ASEAN countries and another by the ACP countries that both clearly rejected the text of Annex C. However, during the first few days of negotiations, these countries were placed under enormous pressure from the US and the EU (and others) not to table these alternative texts or they would not receive other “concessions” (including the so-called development package or the so-called aid for trade package – both of which are seriously problematic in themselves). For a while things looked very bad and there has been a lot of campaigning in the NGO rooms to support these countries to defend their own positions on Annex C.
The good news is that yesterday, despite massive pressure from the EU and the US, the G90 tabled an alternative text to the GATS, while another group of countries (including Cuba, Indonesia, Philippines, South Africa and Venezuela) issued a letter stating that Annex C, having not been agreed by members, is not an appropriate basis for negotiations.
However, the really bad news is that the GATS facilitator, Korean Minister Kim has tried to sum up negotiations by saying that only 15 countries had concerns with the text of Annex C (apparently counting the G90 as only one country!), while 26 wanted Annex C maintained (as though it was a legitimate text in the first place, which is simply false). His suggested resolution was that if there was no consensus by today, he would simply remove the brackets from Annex C and that the text will remain as it is. This would mean that he would be indicated consensus on this text that has been written SOLELY in the interests of Northern countries to open up and exploit the public services of the rest of the world in the global south.
We are now waiting to see how this situation will be resolved. If Annex C is pushed through it will not only be a devastating result for the people of the global south in respect to maintaining their public services, but it will also indicate a new and even more anti-democratic process is being introduced into WTO negotiations.
I was going to go Christmas shopping this afternoon, but I think that I may have to stick around instead…
No comments:
Post a Comment