Cancun and the World Trade Organisation
In football, a foul is not the end of the match. The referee blows the whistle, the injured side gets a free kick and play resumes. But what happens when one side claims that the rules of the game are being rigged in their opponents' favour and start to leave the pitch? The game, of course, is over.
That's what finally happened in Cancun this week at the meeting of the World Trade Organisation. A team of 21 nations, including Brazil, India and China, decided they'd had enough and headed for the changing rooms.
So what's unfair about the game of world trade?
Rather a lot, actually. Take agriculture, for example - the trade on which most people in developing countries depend.
The world's richest nations spend huge sums each year subsidising their own farmers. The result is food mountains and milk lakes, which are 'dumped' on poor countries.
But the result is not a level playing field. Most developing countries have laws to protect their farmers from going bust through cheap foreign imports, but rich countries respond by sending vast numbers of negotiators to WTO meetings - many more than poor countries can afford - to insist that the laws are removed in order to open up these markets.
However, while insisting on free markets in developing countries, we maintain a form of protection in our own, by means of tariffs. These amount to an average charge of 60 per cent on the value of all imports - though it can be as high as 200 per cent. The result is that poor countries hand over around £10 billion per year to rich countries in agricultural tariffs alone.
Some might say that if the prophets were alive today they would have railed against this situation. But some prophets are alive today, and a number of them were among those representing the 21 players who left the field in Cancun. They weren't claiming that the WTO is inherently corrupt, nor that it needs to be disbanded, nor that their own economic houses are all in order.
They were claiming instead that there is no negotiating with injustice. It has to be challenged.
It's time to make the rules fair - so that everyone plays ball.
Peter Heslam
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