ILEAP initiative names its first executive director

Geneva, 20 Jan (Chakravarthi Raghavan) The ILEAP initiative (International Lawyers and Economists against Poverty), a not-for profit, non-governmental initiative to provide “timely, responsive and practical legal and economic expertise” to developing countries that will assist them in achieving trade-related development and poverty reduction, has announced the appointment of its first executive director, Mr. Dominique Njinkeu.

He is currently Deputy Director of Research at the African Research Consortium.

Mr. Njinkeu joins ILEAP following an extensive career in the field of development, with particular reference to macroeconomics and development financing; linkages between trade, regional integration and poverty reduction; and international negotiations. Mr. Njinkeu at present holds the position of Deputy Director of Research at the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) in Nairobi, Kenya. Previously he served as Research Coordinator of the Reseau Politiques Industrielles in Dakar, Senegal, and previously has taught at the University of Yaound Cameroon, at the Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada, and at Southern Illinois University, USA.

In various messages from other individuals and non-government groupings posted on websites, the ILEAP and its new executive director have been encouraged and assured of support. But the tasks are even more daunting than when the idea was first mooted.

The idea of such a grouping to provide non-governmental inputs from the legal, economic and related professions, on the lines of ‘Medicins Sans Frontier’ in the health area, to assist developing countries in the sphere of trade and trade-related issues was mooted by Professor Gerry Helleiner in his Raul Prebisch lecture at UNCTAD in 2000, and pursued at a meeting in Nairobi last year.

In that lecture Helleiner came out against a WTO New Round, even if labelled as a ‘development round’, against any multilateral negotiations as a single undertaking, and had called for reform and reorientation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), including its governance to make it more transparent and accountable.

“What the WTO most requires, then, is not now an attempt at a new Round of ‘global’ negotiations which, even if labelled a ‘Development Round’ for public relations purposes, would probably, under present arrangements, only recreate the imbalances and inequities of the last Round,” said Helleiner.

Prof Helleiner in the lecture had recalled that the Marrakesh Agreement was itself the product of a Round that was launched with much fanfare about the symbolic importance of its location in a developing country. “And where did that lead?” he asked.

“Rather, what is required is a pause in current processes - to permit a deliberate reconsideration, even a formal redefinition, of the fundamental purposes of the organization; and a thorough and independent review of its current capacity to achieve them.”

Helleiner, one of the world’s leading, if not the leading development economist and authority, had called for a UN-appointed and independently funded group to review and reconceptualize the WTO. He was also very critical of the under-funded and inadequate technical assistance programs, most of which are aimed at enabling developing countries to comply and frequently aimed at “simply selling WTO rules”.

However, so long as the WTO and the international rules system continue along this path, there is a need as an immediate option “to seek better protection for the weaker members of the international community on a case-by-case basis,” Helleiner said and suggested the initiative.

The Canadian academic had asked civil society to mobilise itself and, rather than use street protests to shut down the WTO, bring the pressure of ideas to bring about changes, though conceding that history showed that changes often came as a result of major crisis.

If anything, between the concept being outlined in the 2000 UNCTAD Prebisch lecture and now, the trading system and the international rules governing economic systems have become more weighted against developing countries, and the WTO has shown itself, over the period, as incapable of any meaningful reforms - even adoption of very simple procedures, the norm in all international organizations for their meetings.

The calls for internal transparency in decision-making at the WTO, both in its preparatory processes and the Ministerial Conferences remain stalled; and the ‘secretive green-room processes’ to bully the few dissenting countries, continue.

Also, since Helleiner’s views at the 2000 Prebisch lecture, the developing countries have been rail-roaded at Doha into launching another trade round of multilateral negotiations, and it has been called a ‘Development Round’ and repeatedly used to the point of becoming a slogan.

Not only is there very little ‘Development’ content in the negotiating agenda of the round launched in November 2001 at Doha, but in the year since its launch, the few promises that had been held out have proved to be like ‘promises of kings writ on water’ (a folk saying in many parts of the world).

Transparency and inclusiveness in decision-making remains a will-of-the-wisp at the WTO. Implementation issues and special and differential treatment for developing countries have missed their deadlines for implementation, and unlikely to achieve anything in the extended deadline.

A separate decision at Doha, but not part of the Single Undertaking, the Ministerial Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health, has also failed to meet the deadline, and after 14 months is yet to deliver on the promise that appropriate decisions would be taken to enable countries without manufacturing or inadequate manufacturing capacity to use the averred flexibilities of the TRIPS agreement to provide affordable, essential medicines to their peoples.

The PhRMA profit-interests have proved stronger than public health interests of the poor.

And there is a continuance of the spectacle, seen just before Xmas at the WTO, of debates and negotiations among trade diplomats on which diseases people should be saved from through access to cheap medicines, and from which they could be allowed to suffer and die if they don’t have the money to buy the monopoly-profit medicines.

Voices of criticism and critiques inside the UN system, about the asymmetries and inequities of the trading system and its rules, have been silenced, partly by the careerism in the secretariats and the interests of the very rich elites in the developing world too, but much more by the actions of the WTO leadership and the real masters of the WTO, the US and EU, who have been intervening into initiatives of other UN system organizations, so that a single view postulated on the power of major industrial nations and their ‘bullying’ tactics prevail.

An example has been the fate of the UNDP-sponsored report on trade,’Making Global Trade Work for People’, a report which has had extensive inputs from many leading trade and development economics specialists, and the outcome of wide range of consultations with civil society and others.

And the report and views on the trading system are nothing very revolutionary, and some of the views there, including on the non-trade issues cluttering up the WTO and making it the focus of public criticisms, have been expressed in stronger terms by many leading economists, including in some areas (like TRIPS etc) by free trade ideologues like Jagdish Bhagwati.

However, even this level of dissent has proved unpalatable.

According to diplomatic sources in Geneva and in New York, the WTO had protested and complained about the report to the UN Secretary-General, and the US State Department too applied pressures on the UNDP and its administrator, Mr. Malloch Brown.

As a result, the report originally to have been launched in Geneva, is now being launched at a function by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, who had funded the consultation processes. – SUNS5267

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