It’s time to pull the plug on APEC

As the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) extravaganza winds up for another year, bemused journalists are resorting to the familiar headline: ‘whither APEC?’

Many officials and politicians now privately concede the obvious: APEC’s raison d’etre, the so-called Bogor Agenda of achieving free and open trade and investment by 2010 for the richer members and 2020 among poorer ones, will never be achieved. The APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC), far from being the driving force of APEC, ritually complains that governments have not gone far enough and take no notice of them. Sideshows for women and youth have failed to ‘put a social face on APEC’. Even the protests have subsided.

Rabid free traders, including New Zealand, who promoted this so-called Bogor Agenda, no longer hold the ascendancy. Ironically, the Malaysian government that was once derided by APEC’s Anglo-American members as ‘recalcitrant’ is now in the mainstream, promoting pragmatism. Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister told this year’s CEO Summit of ‘growing recognition that globalization is not the universal and unmitigated good that it was once portrayed to be. It has many positive elements, but it also has a severe downside, which impacts more heavily on the poor, the deprived and the disenfranchised.’ While there was growing consensus about its ‘enormous downsides’, ‘there is still much controversy about what can be done to remedy it’ and how. Such sentiments were absent from the official APEC communiqué, as the pretence of commitment to the Bogor goals has to be maintained.

As an observer of almost every APEC meeting since 1993, this comes as no surprise. The competing objectives of the ‘Anglo-Americans’ to gain entry to the region for their goods and investors and the economic integration approach of Japan and other Asian countries were a recipe for paralysis. Politics was always going to overtake purely economic and business goals when governments faced economic crises, social damage and political unrest. As other more potent forums emerged, notably the World Trade Organization (WTO), APEC became increasingly irrelevant. The focus of protests shifted accordingly.

Those who defend APEC’s continued existence cite two reasons. First, APEC provides a unique forum for political leaders to discuss major regional issues informally. Every year since 1997 a major crisis, such as the Asian financial crisis, East Timor or terrorism, has taken centre stage. Leaders meetings were a belated addition to the APEC schedule in 1993. Now they have eclipsed the trade ministers meetings, just as political issues have eclipsed trade ones. But they are only likely to continue so long as the US President comes. That means making it worth his while by supporting, or not attacking, core US demands. In which case, why not hold a regional leaders meeting hosted by the US and abandon the pretence and expense of the APEC economic forum?

Presumably because APEC serves a second function - helping to link a network that spans the WTO, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, North American Free Trade Agreement and a growing number of bilateral free trade and investment treaties. Together they normalize the economic globalization agenda and exclude any voices of dissent. The mythology that free trade and free markets will deliver the poor and oppressed from poverty and exploitation is legitimized and strengthened.

Today, APEC’s primary economic role is to prepare the ground and reduce blockages to the new ‘Doha’ round of WTO negotiations. This year’s APEC meeting will build on the UN Conference on Financing Development in Monterrey, Mexico and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, both of which were manipulated by the major powers to reinforce the Doha negotiating agenda and suppress any alternative models of social and economic development.

Next month the show will move on to Sydney for an invitation only ‘mini-ministerial’, which poorer countries have condemned as a continuation of the WTO’s anti-democratic practices. Massive protests are expected there, and at any similar meetings that try to broker backroom deals before the next WTO ministerial next September in Cancun, Mexico.

In a parallel process, governments like New Zealand’s will continue to stitch together a patchwork of bilateral free trade and investment agreements to achieve what APEC has failed to do - move the WTO’s globalization agenda further and faster, locking the door against a more balanced and democratically determined economic, social and cultural development agenda.

The refrain from every APEC meeting, repeated in this year’s Ministers’ Declaration and by Australia’s Trade Minister Mark Vaile at the CEO’s Summit, is that governments and businesses must sell the economic globalization agenda more effectively. But people are not rejecting their model because of a lack of propaganda; it is because of the model itself. A first step is to abolish forums like APEC and engage in genuine dialogue about alternative models of economic, social and political development for our own countries and subsequently for the world.

Professor Jane Kelsey from the University of Auckland, and a member of the Action, Research and Education Network of Aotearoa (ARENA) comments on the APEC meeting from Los Cabos in Mexico.