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Info Service on WTO and Trade Issues (Sept21/01) Washington DC, 31 Aug (D. Ravi Kanth) – Are there any parallels between the sudden withdrawal by the United States from Afghanistan, and Washington’s departure from the Doha round of trade negotiations? Well, there appears to be a strong correlation between these two events. The longest military conflict launched by the dwindling Pax Americana in October 2001 ended amid the huge destruction of Afghan society and later Iraq and Syria. While the US seemed to have lost around 2,500 military personnel, more than 200,000 Afghans have been killed since 2001, according to Bhaskar Sunkara, the Guardian’s US columnist, on 30 August. The US war, which started in Afghanistan and later spread to Iraq on false and unjustified claims, left Washington with huge financial costs. In Afghanistan alone, the US war “cost taxpayers $824.9 billion or, on average $3.4 billion a month,” according to a report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on 30 August. Scholars at Brown University’s Cost of War project, as cited by the WSJ, estimate that the war’s total costs, “like caring for more than 20,000 injured veterans, have already risen into the trillions.” The Guardian’s Sunkara says that “contrary to the popular imagination, opposition to wars from Vietnam to Iraq were spearheaded by workers, not the rich and the professional classes that serve them.” In short, the US military-industrial complex which is strongly embraced by the Beltway, the ultimate power establishment, continues to call the shots in Washington. It could be held responsible for creating a permanent space for “war psychosis” that permeates the American establishment. Perhaps, the US President Joe Biden, who is regarded as an establishment president, chose to end the Afghan war. Significantly, the wars waged since the Spanish-American war in 1898 to the US war in Afghanistan in 2001 seem to be linked with Washington’s trade interests, according to several studies. More importantly, the “two-decade occupation of Afghanistan”, which is described by the New York Times Editorial Board as a “nation-building project”, now remains in tatters after causing colossal destruction and damage to countries in the Middle East, according to various studies. THE PURSUIT OF TRADE INTERESTS IN 2001 A month after invading Afghanistan in October 2001, following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, the US Trade Representative Ambassador Robert Zoellick along with his partners from the so-called “coalition of the willing” such as European Union trade commissioner Pascal Lamy, launched the Doha Round of trade negotiations in Doha, Qatar in November 2001. Many developing and least developed countries, spearheaded by the group of like-minded countries such as India, Malaysia, and other countries, opposed the launch of the new round of trade negotiations when the Uruguay Round trade commitments that were concluded in 1994 were not yet fully implemented. Moreover, the Uruguay Round commitments created numerous difficulties for developing countries over the lack of clarity on the issue of special and differential treatment. Indeed, the like-minded group of developing and least developed countries sought a proper assessment of the promised gains from the Uruguay Round commitments and the burden being imposed on the developing countries. That demand was pushed under the carpet due to opposition from the US and the EU among others. The US and the EU promised several developmental gains for the developing and least developed countries, including the review of the implementation issues arising from the Uruguay Round commitments. The developing countries were promised that their demand, in more than 80 proposals, for making special and differential treatment simple and effective would be addressed. The developing countries were also promised that the historical inequities in agriculture will be comprehensively addressed, with sharp reduction commitments on tens of billions of dollars of trade-distorting subsidies. The developing countries were further promised that substantial market access will be provided to their agricultural exports to the developed countries. The developing countries were assured that they will be offered less-than-full-reciprocity in reducing tariffs in agriculture and industrial market access commitments. Due to opposition to the four “Singapore issues” (so-named for the inaugural WTO Ministerial Conference hosted by the city state in 1996) encompassing trade and investment, competition policy, government procurement and trade facilitation, the developing countries were told that they will secure gains to the tune of $1 trillion from trade facilitation, according to claims made by the former WTO director-general Pascal Lamy. The developing countries were promised that several areas in rules, including non-tariff barriers such as anti- dumping and subsidies and countervailing measures, particularly the most controversial “zeroing” methodology used by the US Department of Commerce in anti-dumping investigations, will be addressed. The Doha rules agenda also included other areas of interest to the US and other members of the “Friends of the Fish” group such as fisheries subsidies. But they were not high on the agenda. COMPARISON BETWEEN AFGHANISTAN & TRADE TALKS AT WTO Like the conduct of the wars by the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US and its partners, with what seemed like dedicated assistance and support from former WTO director-general Roberto Azevedo, who was also a former Brazilian trade envoy to the WTO, continued to shift the goalposts since the WTO’s ninth ministerial conference in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2013. Azevedo played a crucial role in ensuring that the US and its allies secured the Trade Facilitation Agreement that was fiercely opposed by the developing countries. While the developed countries had little to do in implementing their trade facilitation commitments as they already have them in their rule book, the developing countries have incurred a huge cost in implementing the burdensome trade facilitation commitments. Although the developing countries had managed to get a condition-ridden interim “peace clause” on public stockholding (PSH) programs for food security at the Bali ministerial conference, which was further clarified as a perpetual PSH agreement in November 2014, it still remained to be made permanent. Efforts to secure a permanent agreement on PSH at the WTO’s 11th ministerial conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in December 2017 were stymied by the US, when it blocked its passage. The developing countries have been deceived time and time again since 2004, despite a positive Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration in December 2005. When the US was required to agree to substantial reduction commitments in trade-distorting domestic subsidies in 2006, the former WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy suspended the negotiations for the first time, which was unheard of in the history of global trade negotiations. He did this ostensibly to help the George W. Bush administration in the US mid-term elections. Finally, the US pulled the plug on the Doha trade negotiations in July 2008, while pursuing two areas that are at the heart of its Doha trade agenda, namely, trade facilitation and fisheries subsidies. While killing off the Doha trade negotiations at the WTO’s tenth ministerial conference in Nairobi, Kenya, in December 2015, the US and its allies almost demolished the multilateral framework for conducting trade negotiations at the subsequent Buenos Aires ministerial conference in December 2017. By launching the plurilateral Joint Statement Initiatives (JSIs) on electronic commerce, investment facilitation, disciplines for micro, small, and medium enterprises, and trade and gender, at the 11th ministerial conference in Buenos Aires, the developing countries are being denied developmental policy space. WORSENING PANDEMIC & GLIB PROMISES BY THE US With the worsening COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc in the developing and least developed countries since it first appeared in 2019, the US and other developed countries since then have repeatedly made glib pronouncements for providing life-saving vaccines to countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. Yet, they have created “vaccine apartheid” by hoarding vaccines and refusing to release them on an equitable basis. The real figures of the loss of human lives seem to be more than 12 million, according to estimates made by researchers in several American universities. While the US promised to support the TRIPS waiver co-sponsored by 63 developing countries, in reality, it has chosen to remain as a silent spectator while the EU and a handful of other countries seem determined to wreck the TRIPS waiver proposal. The international regime of intellectual property rights (IPRs) appears to be the major barrier for scaling up manufacturing capacity for producing diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines to combat COVID-19, according to several studies. TRIPS analysts have held Big Pharma, led by Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies who have made phenomenal profits of close to $100 billion due to their m-RNA vaccines, responsible for failing to share their technology and know-how even though their research was funded by governments. In conclusion, it seems safe to say that the Afghan war as well as the Doha round of trade negotiations were started by the US in 2001 with false promises and a deadly cocktail of military and trade interests. Sadly, the developing countries have suffered incalculable damage due to the seemingly false and unfulfilled promises.
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