WTO talks collapse spells doom for Africa: commentary

The collapse of the World Trade Organization talks spelt doom for African countries, a local newspaper commented on Thursday.

Chronicle, the second largest newspaper in Zimbabwe, carried a comment saying that the collapse of the global trade talks this week has condemned the world's poorest continent to an uncertain future of high tariffs and lagging competitiveness, and means that it may have to rely more on aid than its own resources for survival.

World Trade Organization (WTO) chief, Pascal Lamy on Monday formally recommended the suspension of the Doha Round of global free trade talks, after a meeting of six key trading powers collapsed.

In December last year, the World Trade Organization's sixth ministerial meeting in Hong Kong might not have crashed as spectacularly as previous meetings in Seattle and Cancun but still failed to reach a deal that would satisfy the world's poor, the newspaper said.

For much of this year, Africa has lived with the hope that the rich and powerful nations of the west will finally see the need to give the continent equal footing in trade, it said.

However, the newspaper commented, expectations that the meeting at least hammer out a deal on granting market access to products from the poorest countries failed to materialize since the rich countries left themselves so many exemptions that what was agreed is unlikely to lead to much increase in exports from the poorest countries to rich ones.

The meeting put all the difficult decisions off to be negotiated at the WTO's HQ in Geneva.

That meeting has failed to produce anything and WTO chief Lamy called a halt to nearly five years of negotiations on a free trade deal, saying differences between the major powers could not be bridged, the newspaper said.

It pointed out that rich countries spend billions subsidizing their agricultural sector annually, leading to chronic overproduction and dumping of surpluses on poor countries.

Poor and developing countries such as Zimbabwe, who cannot afford to offer such subsidies but whose economies are agriculture based, remain doomed as they are deprived of a market for their agricultural produce and where there is one, their pricing would not compete with the subsidized farmers from the West, the newspaper said.

All the developing world wants from WTO is reform of this trade practice as it impoverishes small scale farmers while enriching agribusiness in the West. But Washington said it would have made a further offer on farm subsidy cuts had the EU and India been prepared to lower tariffs to let U.S. farmers export more, it noted.

So where does that leave Africa? Nowhere, with agricultural exports remaining largely sidelined by high farm subsidies in the developed world, it said.

The paper said the economic impact of the current failure would not be felt immediately, but the targets of eliminating trade distorting subsidies and realizing tariff free and quota free market access for least developed countries would obviously be affected.

Failure would also send out a strong negative signal for the future of the world economy and the danger of a resurgence of protectionism at a time when the pace of globalization is weighing heavily on the social and economic fabric of many countries and when geopolitical instability is on the rise, the paper said.

The newspaper said, perhaps this is time to implement WTO reforms as the body has become yet another tool for the EU and the U.S. to bully the developing world and assert their dominance.

Source: Xinhua