People's Democracy

THE statements that have come out of Doha – both multilateral and from our own commerce minister – present a mass of contradictions. We have a Ministerial Declaration couched in international officialese that is sufficiently vague as to allow many quite differing interpretations. We have statements from the Chairman of the Ministerial Meeting (from Qatar) which have been promptly contradicted by the US Trade Representative. We have our own commerce minister, Murasoli Maran, making very different sounds in Doha, where he is said to be unhappy over the outcome, and back at home, where he declares it to be a success for India.

In this welter of confusion, what are we to believe ? The issues about which the most noise has been made are the so-called "Singapore issues" (that is, which will now come up definitely at the next Ministerial Meeting to be held in Singapore two years from now) and the Declaration relating to TRIPS and public health. Both of these sets of issues were highly contentious even before the Doha meeting, and the controversies surrounding them have not been resolved by any means. By contrast, the developing countries’ demand for closer attention to "implementation issues" – that is, how the GATT accord and the WTO have actually functioned over the past five years, have received a lot of lip service at Doha but very little in terms of practical changes or actual proposals.

Consider the set of "Singapore issues" : investment rules, competition policy, trade facilitation and government procurement. These are all items included in the agenda at the behest of large capital in the developed countries of the North, and they are all issues that developing countries including India have been opposed to including in trade negotiations. Thus, the European Union has been aggressively pushing for the inclusion of uniform investment rules that will effectively promote the interests of large capital and reducing the power of national governments to control their activities. Competition policy was introduced at the behest of the United States, once again the way it has been formulated so far suggests that its aim will be not so much to promote more competition as to ease the conditions for large capital vis-a-vis government. Trade facilitation measures relate to a bast set of measures that governments have with respect to internal and external trade, such as harmonisation of customs and excise duties, and so on, and amount to tremendous interference in national economic policies. Government procurement issues also relate to opening up the whole area of government purchases to foreign suppliers, and forcing governments to tender across borders, another way of increasing access of large international producers to different national markets.

It is obvious that all of these are further attempts to pry open developing country markets to large international companies, whether in the real of the financial sectors. The audacity of the these demands, coming on the already evident de-industrialisation in many developing countries because of the trade liberalisation that has already occurred, is truly breathtaking. But even more breathtaking is the fact that international power equations are now such that many of these demands were almost pushed through immediately, and even more problematic developed country demands such as those relating to further reductions in industrial tariffs, were being seriously considered.

In the event, the final Declaration has succeeded in postponing the problem to some extent. The exact phrasing with respect to all four Singapore issues is that " negotiations will take place after the Fifth Session of the Ministerial Conference on the basis of a decision to be taken, by explicit consensus, at that Session on modalities of negotiations". The US Trade Representative believes that this is a definite commitment to negotiations ; the Qatari minister and Murasoli Maran both claim that this means that the negotiations can still be scuttled two years from now if there is no explicit consensus on "modalities". Clearly, the outcome is still something that can evolve, depending upon how international geopolitics and public pressure across the world works in the coming period.

Citizens of the world, including in developing countries, did win something in the shape of the Ministerial Declaration on TRIPS and public health. This is the strongest international statement so far on the need to ensure that national patent laws protect public health interests and provide affordable medicines to those in need. While this declaration certainly does not go far enough in terms of providing legally binding commitments and changing the wording of the TRIPS text itself, and remain a political document rather than a legal one, there is no doubt that it will provide an important framework for subsequent use of the TRIPS agreement by large companies in the developed world, especially in matters relating to public health. Similarly, while it is still vague about the possibilities for export of cheaper drugs produced using compulsory licensing (an issue which affects the Indian drug industry directly) it leaves open the chance that this can be decided positively by the TRIPS Council eventually.

In fact, the Doha declaration itself illustrates how many anti-social clauses can be introduced in a seemingly innocuous way which does not get noticed until it is too late. Thus, in the Section on trade and environment where most developing country negotiators would be busy looking for phrases that would allow more protectionism by developed countries rather than more opening up of markets, Clause 31 (iii) commits to negotiations on "the reduction or, as appropriate, elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services". This introduces the possibility, for example, of commercialisation of and trading in water services, and bypasses ongoing negotiations on the services agreement where this matter was already deeply controversial.

So, if anything, Doha has underlined the need for much more involvement and active participation by civil society, to force governments into taking positions which reflect the interest of citizens at large rather than just large capital with its very effective lobbying power.