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The Next Head of the WTO? Choose Wisely.
It’s time to put someone from the BRICS in charge of the world’s leading trade body.
In a historic first, the next leader of the World Trade Organization will hail from Latin America. A field of nine candidates has now been winnowed down to two, one from Mexico and one from Brazil, meaning that, at a crucial moment in the history of the international trading system, the leader of the central organization for resolving global trade differences and shaping future agreements will come from the emerging part of the Western Hemisphere.
One candidate, Roberto Azevedo, is currently Brazil’s ambassador to the WTO. The other, Herminio Blanco, is a former Mexican trade minister and one of the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Both are widely respected and well-liked by those who know them well. On the surface, the two candidates seem extremely similar. But to suggest that these men represent a common perspective could not be further from the truth. They illustrate a choice as stark as past and future for an organization that finds itself at a critical turning point.
The knock on Azevedo is that he has never served as a trade minister, a post that has typically been a jumping-off point for past WTO chiefs. But he has been exceptionally active within the halls of the trade organization’s Geneva headquarters — an acknowledged leader there, especially among the world’s rising powers, and he is seen as more closely in touch with the trade issues of the day than is Blanco.
Blanco, trained at the University of Chicago, is exceptionally competent. I worked with him when I was a senior U.S. trade official during the Clinton administration and I know that my colleagues and I always held him in very high regard. But, in the eyes of his critics, he has been out of the international trade arena for too long, having been working in the private sector and not actively involved in the complex, frustrating debates surrounding the Doha world trade talks or the need for meaningful reform of the WTO. The organization, set up officially in 1995, doesn’t seem up to addressing the problems of a modern world crisscrossed with non-tariff barriers or grappling with the new problems of Internet- and services-based trade, widespread currency manipulation, and incipient protection appearing in many guises.
There is, however, a bigger difference between the two men that is already manifesting itself in the early whip-counts of potential voters from around the world. According to trade-community insiders in Washington and around the world with whom I have spoken over the past few days, Blanco is seen as the preferred candidate of the United States and much of what might be described as the traditional or old-school trade establishment. Azevedo, on the other hand, appears to have deeper support among the BRICs and among many of the other representatives of the emerging world.
This split matters, because the principal divide in world trade today is not, as it once was, East-West, trans-Atlantic, or even trans-Pacific. It is much more north-south, a split between developed countries that have long dominated the trade discussions and the emerging ones who, through flexing their muscle effectively for the first time during the Doha Round negotiations, put those discussions on ice until their core concerns could be resolved.
Among the most critical of those concerns are frustrations emerging powers have with the seemingly bullet-proof, reform-resistant series of subsidies that are protecting developed-world agricultural producers at the expense of their counterparts like Brazil, India, and other emerging countries with great potential to provide feed the world. Similarly, the questions associated with how and when emerging powers begin to compete and operate on the same terms and to the same standards as developed powers also loom large. Newly proposed trade deals, such as the recently opened negotiations between the United States and the European Union, have at their heart a desire by these first-world powers to grow closer together and to maintain a more unified front when challenged by the emerging powers led by the BRICs.
The WTO has, thus far, despite a global set of responsibilities, largely been a club built on the vision and delivering special power to representatives of the developed world. But while much is murky about the future of the global economy, one thing is not: The balance of trade growth is shifting, irreversibly to the emerging world. (By 2010, according to the United Nations, developing-country import growth already was responsible for about half of world trade growth.) In addition, the emerging countries represent both a majority of world population and the nations with the greatest need for consistent economic growth if social equity or stability are our shared goals as a planet.
Developed countries fear that having a Brazilian lead the WTO would put their interests at risk. But there’s no reason to think so. Quite the contrary: Azevedo, given his background and support among the most important countries of the emerging world as well as his familiarity with the WTO as it is currently operating, might well be more likely to offer a path toward practical North-South solutions. In addition, Brazil’s own strong stand against currency manipulation — whether by China or the United States — is an example of why it is old-think to assume that an individual’s place of birth represents an ideological strait-jacket.
There are few global organizations about which the view is so widely held that reform is essential and few where, for that reform to be fair and effective, it is so vital that the new voices of the global economy be fairly represented. Because Roberto Azevedo is the best person to lead that change and stand for those voices, he should be the WTO’s next director-general.
via The Next Head of the WTO? Choose Wisely. – By David Rothkopf | Foreign Policy.
via The Next Head of the WTO? Choose Wisely. – By David Rothkopf | Foreign Policy.
Obama Gives Key Agriculture Post to Monsanto Man
Obama Gives Key Agriculture Post to Monsanto Man
I guess this means GM crops and other unknown horrors will be fostered on the public with little or no debate
Islam Siddiqui was nominated by US President Barack Obama to the position of Chief Agricultural Negotiator at the office of the US Trade Representative. He is currently Vice President of Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America. CropLife is an agricultural industry trade group that lobbies on behalf of Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and other pesticide and agricultural biotech corporations.
Siddiqui’s statements and positions—both as a public official and as an industry executive— coupled with CropLife America’s consistent record on public policy issues demonstrate a narrow and short-sighted view of American agriculture and trade interests. This viewpoint consistently places the special interests of large agribusiness above the health and welfare interests the broader public, the international community and the environment.
WHAT DOES SIDDIQUI’S POSITION ENTAIL?
Enforcing Trade Agreements
According to the Progressive Government Institute, the Chief Agricultural Negotiator “conducts critical trade negotiations and enforces trade agreements… This includes multilaterally in the World Trade Organization (WTO), regionally in the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and bilaterally with various countries and groups of countries. The ambassador also resolves agricultural trade disputes and enforces trade agreements, including issues related to new technologies, subsidies, and tariff and non-tariff barriers and meets regularly with domestic agricultural industry groups to assure their interest are represented in trade.” The industry groups’ interests will be more than adequately represented, as the WTO’s Doha Round will be a perfect opportunity for the agrochemical industry to push for trade agreements that maintain US subsidies, lower tariffs on chemicals, promote GM crops, and unfairly benefit the agrochemical companies that Siddiqui represents.
A NOTE ON CROP LIFE
In August 2005, CropLife America met with Bush Administration officials at the Office of Managment and Budget and EPA to allow for children to participate in pesticide experiments. CropLife America urged certain allowances to be made for chemical testing on children. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility criticized the meeting for excluding the perspectives of ethicists, child advocates and scientists. EPA one month later adopted a human testing rule in line with CropLife America’s suggestions. Environmental groups sued the EPA for failing to adequately protect women and children. [Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, 5/30/06]
PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruck commented on the backdoor meeting, “These meeting notes make it clear that the pesticide industry’s top objective is access to children for experiments. After reading these ghoulish notes one has the urge to take a shower. For an administration which trumpets its concern for the ‘value and dignity of life,’ it is disconcerting that no ethicists, children advocates or scientists were invited to this meeting to counterbalance the pesticide pushers.” [Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, 5/30/06]
After 30 years, is a GM food breakthrough finally here? | Environment | The Observer.
via After 30 years, is a GM food breakthrough finally here? | Environment | The Observer.
Communists propose Russia-led Eurasian unity vs. imperialist globalization — RT
Leader of the Communist Party of the the Russian Federation Gennady Zyuganov speaks at a rally in honor of the 95 anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.(RIA Novosti / Vladimir Astapkovich)
Leading Asian countries and Russia should unite in their efforts to counter-balance the “American-style globalization,” says the leader of Russian Communist Party (KPRF) Gennady Zyuganov.
Russia has historically been the centre of Eurasia, linking European and Asian civilizations, Zyuganov pointed out.
“We propose to restore in a new shape the “Eurasian bridge” with the closest and most efficient cooperation between our peoples, countries and continents. Russia– which for millennia has been actively participating in the life of both Europe and Asia – is ready to fulfill its historic mission and be a link between the main centers of modern civilization in this most difficult moment of its development,” the KPRF chairman stated at the Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP) in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Capitalism is rotten: all its spheres from production and politics to culture and morality have been affected. A whole range of European countries are on the verge of bankruptcy, the Russian Communist leader observed, as cited on the KPRF official website.
“After the collapse of the Soviet Union life on Earth has become a lot more difficult and dangerous,” Zyuganov stated.
In recent years the world has seen numerous devastating bloody conflicts, including the recent unrest in the Middle East and North Africa.
“The colonial strategy of the US and Western countries that depend on it put the humanity on the brink of a world war,” the Russian Communist leader believes.
Imperialist countries have created institutions that help them to “govern the world”, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.
“For those who resist ‘peaceful’ subjugation to the globalists there is NATO, an institution of military violence,” Zyuganov noted. However, the KPRF leader is confident that the resistance to “globalization American-style” is mounting.
One of the new geopolitical trends is the shift of world economic center to the Asian-Pacific region. The Russian Communists believe that the maximum use of economic, scientific and cultural potential of Asian countries could help to solve global problems and ensure food, energy, military and economic security.
Zyuganov also proposed forming a parliament for Asian union countries in the future. He believes it would give an additional impetus to the development of cooperation.
via Communists propose Russia-led Eurasian unity vs. imperialist globalization — RT.
via Communists propose Russia-led Eurasian unity vs. imperialist globalization — RT.