Groser loses WTO Idol and competes for TPPA X Factor

8
3

Adbusters_CorporateAmericaFlag

Last month Tim Groser failed to make the final cut for the new Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO). We can expect him to be more like a bear with a sore head than usual. He clearly does not enjoy Parliament, and there must be a limit to the amount of time he can justify spending offshore now the WTO leadership campaign is over.

There are some other, more serious, ramifications of the WTO selection result, as Groser indicated on The Nation on Saturday. New Zealand will become even more selective about how much energy and resources it puts into the WTO. Instead, the Minister and his officials will focus on cementing more far-reaching bilateral and regional arrangements, with the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) at the top of the agenda.

It is easy to understand why Groser was so down on the WTO. After 12 years, the Doha round remains moribund and the WTO agreements, concluded back in the mid-1990s, have been left for dead by the flood of free trade deals that the richer countries have brokered on behalf of their corporations. Groser must have thought he could pull some kind of rabbit out of the WTO hat. Now he won’t get the chance.

The final contest came down to two Latin Americans. Mexico’s former Trade Minister Herminio Blanco, who was supported by the US and the EU, is a consummate neoliberal free trader and the country’s chief negotiator for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) concluded in 1993. The other final candidate was Brazil’s representative to the WTO since 1997, Roberto Azevêdo.

The Brazilian won. That is viewed as a victory for the BRICs – Brazil, India, Russia, China and sometimes South Africa. New Zealand will not like that, even though Brazil is a member of the club of agricultural liberalisers known as the Cairns Group. Since the result was announced last Tuesday, Azevêdo has already been hailed by Indian commentators as a champion for the global South and his appointment putting ‘an end to the North’s monopoly over political and economic decisions’.

There is a degree of over-exuberance about what Azevêdo might be willing and able to deliver. The role of the Director-General is to reach consensus outcomes, which means appeasing the US and EU, as well as New Zealand. During the campaign Azevêdo described the institution as a “sick patient”, saying the next leader “has to put on the gloves, the masks and start operating immediately because the patient is almost terminal.” The next biennial WTO ministerial meeting is in Bali in December. Going by the past decade, there is no change he can find consensus on anything significant, prolonging the crisis of legitimacy that besets the WTO.

Groser attributes the WTO’s problems to an overcrowding of the agenda and negotiating table. In other words, it is collapsing under its own weight. Some of us predicted that would happen when the WTO was formed in 1995 – not simply because of the overreach, but also because imposing a corporate-driven neoliberal rulebook on most of the countries of the world was unsustainable. And so it has proved.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

Sadly, Groser has only learned half the lessons from the breakdown of the WTO. He remains a disciple of the model; he just thinks it has to be achieved more expeditiously. There are several ways to achieve that. One is to hijack the WTO. A club of mainly rich countries, which calls itself the ‘really good friends of services’ (truly, I am not making it up!) has already begun its own selective negotiation for rules that guarantee free rein for foreign firms and lock countries into a market model of services in perpetuity.

The WTO’s existing agreement, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), was problematic enough. It is the reason the Clark government could not introduce local content quotas for broadcasting in 1999; it restricts our options for education and environmental policies; and it limits our options to re-regulate financial markets, even in a crisis. But the GATS has far too many restrictions for the liking of services transnationals that dominate the lucrative sectors of finance, entertainment and telecoms, tourism, shipping, the professions, and natural resource industries like forestry, fisheries and mining.

New Zealand is in this club, boots and all. The goal is to stitch up a ‘high quality agreement’ that they can get the rest of the WTO countries to sign on to. Sound familiar? Whether this will go anywhere is anyone’s guess, especially as Azevêdo and the rest of the BRICs have strongly criticised the initiative.
Aside from the sideshows at the WTO, Groser and MFAT will refocus on the TPPA. So will the US, alongside negotiations for a Trans-Atlantic free trade deal with the EU they announced last year. Thankfully, they have as many points of conflict as they have agreement, so even the talks that begin this year are expected to move slowly.

The pressure to conclude the TPPA will intensify as the talks resume in Lima, Peru next week and when the political leaders meet in Bali in October. However, as I have written previously, the growing number of players and the supersized ambitions of the US and its corporations (not to mention our own government) could well see the TPPA itself become Doha’d. Groser has said that must not happen. But at the same time he says Japan’s entry into the talks prove bigger for New Zealand than a deal with the US. He knows the two goals are contradictory. There will be no quick deal with Japan at the table; nor will there be a gold standard that goes further than any previous agreement has done.

Logic aside, Groser’s considerable energies will now be focused on pulling off such a deal, and will require even greater vigilance from those of us who believe it would be a disaster for New Zealand and the people of the other eleven countries currently involved.

As I explain in my new short ebook entitled Hidden Agendas: Explaining the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (published this week by Bridget Williams Books and available at bwbooks.co.nz), this is not a rational process. But it is one that has high stakes for us all.

8 COMMENTS

  1. The bwbooks.co.nz link worked for me.
    This from the site…

    Ebook publication: May 2013
    Pages: 84
    RRP: $4.99
    DOI: 10.7810/9781927131909

    If you want to save 5 bucks you can ask Auckland Libraries to order it on their “Suggestion for Purchase”.form which comes up if you click the “Cant Find It?” tab on their web page..

  2. The entire globalisation project is on the brink of collapse because it is totally dependent on use of copious amounts of diesel. And the extraction of oil has peaked and is on the way down. Every day that passes the situation gets worse. declining net energy leads to collapse of present economic arrangements and collapse of industrial agriculture = mass starvation.

    And on top of that, CO2 emissions are surging. So, do we carry on with this madness and drive ourselves into destitution, starvation and an uninhabitable planet? Or do we say: “Enough of this madness?”

    I guess we already know the answer. Option 1.

    • CO2 emissions have just hit 400ppm.
      I have heard that peak oil is no longer the problem, if they burn the reserves we already have we are screwed.

Comments are closed.