AFRICA TRADE NETWORK
Africa-wide Civil Society Preparatory Meeting for 7th WTO Ministerial Conference
Cape Town, 1-3 October, 2009
The Africa Trade Network (ATN) held a meeting of African trade unions, farmers groups, faith-based groups, women’s organisations, non-governmental organisations and representatives of governments, parliaments, and social movements, in Cape Town, South Africa, from 1-3 October, 2009. Jointly hosted by the Economic Justice Network, South Africa, and the Third World Network-Africa, the meeting discussed strategy towards the 7th Ministerial Conference of the Word Trade Organisation (WTO) in November/December 2009, and came to the following understandings.
1. The neo-liberal policies implemented in our countries over the past decades and reinforced by the rules of theWTO have wreaked havoc on our economies and lives. Those policies are also responsible for the on-going global financial and economic crises that have devastated our countries. The same policies form the essence of the proposals currently on the table in the WTO’s current Doha Round of negotiations for further trade liberalisation and deregulation.
2. If completed on the current terms, the Doha round will aggravate the problems of our economies. It will also take away the very policy instruments needed (and being applied) to address the current crises and to prevent similar crises in the future.
3. Contrary to proclamations such as those of G20 governments and officials of the WTO, a speedy conclusion of the Doha round is not an appropriate response to the global crises. In fact, the scale, sweep and impact of these crises demand the exact opposite: at the very least, the Doha negotiations must be suspended as governments face up to the full dimensions, impacts and implications of the crises.
4. African governments must live up to their responsibility to promote the needs and interests of their people and protect them from further devastation at the hands of neo-liberal policies implemented in the past and of effects of current and the crisis. Furthermore, it is time for our governments to stand up for those developmental positions that they have articulated since the launch of the Doha round, including the countless proposals reflecting Africa’s development needs that have been articulated at the level of Africa Union Ministers of Trade.
5. WE DEMAND A MORATORIUM ON ALL NEGOTIATIONS UNDER THE DOHA ROUND.
This is necessary for all governments to assess the consistency of the proposals on the table with the policy measures necessitated by the global crises. In addition, African governments, in particular, owe a duty to their people to assess the developmental implications of the Doha proposals against the developmental needs of their people, some of which are captured in their own past proposals. Thus, African governments must:
• defend their right and ability to formulate their own policies appropriate to the development of our economies; and therefore,
• demand the full protection of their policy space under the Doha negotiations; and
• defend their right to make only those commitments that are consistent with the stage of development of their economies and the developmental imperatives.
6. Accordingly, we reject the various texts which have emerged as the basis for further negotiations in the Doha round, in particular the so-called Chairman’s texts of December 2008 on NAMA and Agriculture, as well as the different elements for Services negotiations. These texts are severely imbalanced against our economies. In essence they promote the interests, concerns and sensitivities of the advanced industrial countries, at the expense of the developmental needs and imperatives of African and other developing countries.
7. In the area of AGRICULTURE, the proposals contained in the texts will undermine food sovereignty, rural livelihoods and development, as well as the development of sustainable national agriculture. While the developed countries retain the space to continue with and even increase the billions of dollars of subsidies that enable their farmers to dump their cheapened products in our countries, African and other countries (who do not have any resources to give similar amounts of subsidy) are only left with skeletons of the tariff policy they need to protect their poor farmers against such subsidies.
8. This situation must be reversed. To this end, among other measures,
• developed countries must cut their domestic subsidies, including drastic reductions to their so-called ‘trade-distorting’ domestic support, and impose severe restraints on the so-called green box subsidies;”
• African and other developing countries must retain robust defensive and protective measures, including tariff policy. In this regard, proposed mechanisms like the Special Product and Special Safeguard Mechanism must be revamped and rehabilitated. At the very least, the African and other developing countries must return to the original forms of the proposals as they submitted them.
• the Cotton subsidies in the advanced industrial countries, in particular the US must be eradicated.
9. In relation to NON-AGRICULTURE MARKET ACCESS (NAMA), the current proposals have subverted the developmental perspective of Doha, especially with regard to the understanding that African and other developing countries will only undertake such as are commensurate with their developmental capacities and needs. Critical principles have been thrown overboard or rendered meaningless, such as special and differential treatment for African and other developing countries as well as the mandate that entitles developing countries to less than full reciprocity vis a vis developed countries in tariff cuts
10. Instead, in departure from all previous practice, a draconian formula for tariff cuts is being adopted which will lead to developing countries in Africa and elsewhere making more severe cuts in their tariff than even the developed countries. In addition to this, even those developing African counties which, by reason of their tariff structure, are not meant to undertake tariff reductions, are committed to disciplines which actually amount to equally drastic cuts and emasculation of their policy space. Least Developed Countries in Africa will suffer the effects of these developments through their membership of the same regional bodies as their other African neighbours.
11. Added to these are pressures for additional commitments in other areas, such as sectoral reductions and export taxes.
12. African countries must stand up against these proposals which are extremely dangerous to their current economic needs and future development. They must rediscover the unity of purpose and perspective contained in their proposals articulated at AU meetings (before they succumbed to being put in different categories. In this regard,
• the coefficients proposed for application to developing countries in Africa and beyond, as well as other new innovations and demands by developed countries, including the anti-concentration clause as well as the attempt to make sectoral reductions mandatory, must be rejected;
• so-called paragraph 6 countries must reject the scope and level of binding;
• African countries must affirm their right, as per WTO body of rules and past practice, to set targets for tariff reduction commensurate with their stage of development.
13. Liberalisation and deregulation of SERVICES are directly implicated in global financial and economic crisis. The policies adopted in response to the crisis have directly challenged the logic of the policies of de-regulation. Effectiveness of these responses to the current crisis and prevention of future ones requires reversal of this logic. Instead, the proposals on the table move in the opposite direction, towards further liberalisation and deregulation. African countries cannot afford this insanity.
14. WE demand that :
- there should be no further liberalization of services; in this regard existing offers made by developing countries as part of the Doha round must be withdrawn and no new ones made
- government procurement be kept out of services discussions;
- domestic regulations must be allowed to be strengthened in order to provide robust regulate financial markets, and, in this regard, the restrictions on domestic regulation being currently proposed must be removed;
- emergency safeguards mechanisms must be developed and put in place as a priority
- developing countries must be allowed to roll back past financial services deregulation without having to “pay compensation”;
- there must be no link between services negotiations and negotiations in other areas such as agriculture and non-agricultural market access.
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