Reflections on the World Summit on Sustainable Development

W$$D: The Road from Doha to Cancun, via Johannesburg

 

Professor Jane Kelsey, University of Auckland, presented to the Institute of International Affairs, Auckland Branch, 2 October 2002

 

As the United States (US) government prepares to go to war against Iraq, unilaterally if necessary, the United Nations (UN) appears practically impotent. The attacks on September 11 have given the US the pretext for further weakening the formal UN system of one-country-one-vote and exposed its most powerful forum, the Security Council, as a façade which has the choice of either legitimating US actions or being ignored. The US has taken an equally belligerent line on other multilateral initiatives, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court. These developments have been explored in considerable depth by international commentators, although too little of this analysis has been aired in New Zealand.

 

My focus tonight is a subtler, parallel development that has attracted much less attention. For several years there has been a clear and systematic strategy to shift substantive regulatory authority over social, environmental, cultural and development measures from national governments and United Nations forums to an increasingly dominant and all-embracing World Trade Organisation (WTO). Over the past year this repositioning has been driven hard by the US as part of its ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. In the words of US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick shortly after the September 11 attacks, showing leadership in the international economic arena could help restore the ‘might and light’ of America, build a coalition of countries that cherishes liberty in all its aspects, and defend those ‘fragile democracies that rely on the international economy to overcome poverty and create opportunity’.[1] These two elements - a dominant, expansive WTO and aggressive US unilateralism – are an alarming combination.

 

The UN-sponsored World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg last month was the latest setting for this strategy. Those who recall the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero some ten years ago might have expected this to be another talk-fest on the traditional ‘green’ issues of deforestation, biodiversity, animal conservation and fisheries, and ‘brown’ issues like access to health, water and sanitation. It may have been just that for the participants who remained blissfully unaware of the battles fought during the preparatory phases and at the Summit itself over the relationship between economic globalisation and ‘sustainable development’.

 

For those seeking to influence this debate, on either side, the Summit was effectively a battle over which regime would shape the world’s rules on a broad range of social, environment and development issues. Would it be the comparatively democratic and broad-based, but highly imperfect United Nations, which lacks the ability to enforce its aspirational declarations and ambitious targets, or the market driven and deeply undemocratic World Trade Organisation (WTO) which has the capacity to authorise economic sanctions against those who breach its rules? Or, as one Southern NGO put it, would the UN commit suicide by embracing a privatised model of ‘sustainable development’ whose definitions and strategies were determined by mega-corporations, the World Bank and the WTO.[2]

 

Indian environmental campaigner Vandana Shiva reports that, textually and physically, the sustainability agenda of Rio was displaced by the commercial and corporate agenda of the WTO.[3] The voices of those for whom sustainable development is a matter of life and death - poor countries, small island countries, indigenous nations, peasant farmers and local communities – were marginalised and silenced. So were their demands for debt cancellation, genuine agrarian reform, a human right to food security, housing and safe drinking water, protection of indigenous rights over biodiversity, an end to dumping by the major powers, enforceable controls over transnational companies, and other equally basic concerns.  Even the international environmental lobby was effectively sidelined at the ‘civil society’ venue an hour’s bus ride from the official meeting. According to Shiva, who shared the opening platform of the facile ‘Civil Society Dialogue’ with South African President Thabo Mbeki, even his speech was sanitised - a chilling prediction that ‘global apartheid’ would result if nothing changed was dropped from the delivery under pressure from the US.

 

The voices that dominated the Summit were the major powers, especially the US, European Commission (EC) and Japan. Sponsors, such as BMW, Hewlett Packard and Daimler Chrysler, provided an up-market corporate image. The ‘Summit Star’ recorded the presence of over 700 business executives, 200 companies and more than 100 CEOs. And why wouldn’t they come in full force, asked Mary Louise Malig, from Thai-based Focus on the Global South, ‘when the UN’s priorities have shifted from poverty eradication and environmental preservation to achieving sustainable development via ‘public-private partnerships’ or as Kofi Annan calls it, The Global Compact.[4]

 

The Summit’s location in post-apartheid Johannesburg underscored this paradox. Days before the official Summit opened South African police arrested more than 70 peaceful protestors from the National Land Council and the Landless People’s Movement. Later in the Summit some 20,000 people who marched from the depressed township of Alexandra to the summit venue at elite Sandton were met by some 8000 police officers, plus tanks, helicopters and barricades. This was not simply a showpiece for the international media. When I was in Johannesburg in April this year community groups opposing privatisation had already mobilised against the termination of water and electricity services for non-payment, and associated outbreaks of lethal disease such as cholera.

 

What was originally billed as ‘Rio + 10’ – an opportunity to stock take and move forward a decade after the Rio Summit had produced its Agenda 21 for sustainable development – had become ‘Doha + 10’, a reference to ten months from the launching of a new round of free trade negotiations at the WTO ministerial meeting in Doha in October 2001.

 

This was clearly articulated in the Summit’s two main documents - the Plan for Implementation/Action and the Political Declaration. The critical and most controversial area was Section IV: ‘Sustainable Development in a Globalising World’ (along with the human rights section which addressed women’s rights and abortion). Both documents ignore the controversy that continues to rage over impacts of globalisation on ecological sustainability, environmental dumping, social justice and poverty elimination. They simply reiterate the assertion in the WTO’s founding document that trade liberalisation enhances sustainable development. The prime advocates of that position throughout the Summit, known as the Juscanz group, were Japan, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

 

That does not mean that these claims were uncontested. Stand-offs over trade, finance and governance occurred throughout the preparatory process and the Summit itself. Almost always these were resolved by opting for the lowest common ‘market-friendly’ denominator. Several landmark achievements of Rio, notably the endorsement of the precautionary principle, were seriously weakened. Moves to reinforce the Biodiversity Convention, especially the recognition of recognise national sovereignty over biological resources and benefit sharing with the original holders or country of origin, were neutralised by the US, who advocates the primacy the WTO’s agreement intellectual property rights (TRIPS). Concerns expressed by agencies such as the World Health Assembly, UN Commission on Human Rights and UNCTAD about the social impacts of WTO agreements on development rights to education, water, health care and medicines were similarly ignored.

 

Wording that would have explicitly subordinated the Multilateral Environment Agreements (MEAs) to the WTO rules (a position strongly advocated by Australia) was only excised after last-minute, impassioned interventions from Ethiopia (whose delegate chairs the Africa Group in the Convention on Biological Diversity), Norway and several Caribbean countries. This was a pyrrhic victory. The only reference to the MEAs – which many rather optimistically view as the only real counter-balance to the Multilateral Trade Agreements - was still tied to the work programme of the cynically named WTO ‘Doha Development Round’. Last minute concessions to the EC at Doha had mandated the WTO to undertake a unilateral exercise to clarify the relationship between MEAs and the WTO agreements. The MEA secretariats only have observer status in these discussions, which are led by ministers of trade, not environment. The Doha mandate insists that the outcome must not diminish members’ rights and obligations under the WTO agreements. In other words, any conflicts must be addressed through changes to the MEAs. Any environmental measures that are permitted under the limited WTO exceptions would need to be the least trade restrictive possible to achieve their objective. WTO panels of trade experts have already found against the precautionary principle. Restrictions on genetically modified products and compulsory labelling may well be outlawed.

 

These outcomes dovetail with the report from the Economic Strategy Institute released in May 2002 entitled Reconciling Trade and the Environment in the WTO, which some commentators consider articulates the WTO’s attack on the MEAs. Its author suggests that the WTO could become an effective forum for resolving the relationship between the requirements of WTO trade rules and international environmental law. He argues that the international community has two options: the status quo or negotiating a WTO agreement on Trade and the Environment, and concludes ‘It's not a matter of whether the WTO takes up the environment but how.’[5]

 

Doha+10 had a second, equally important dimension - the privatisation of the Rio agenda, and the empowering of transnational corporations to define the meaning of sustainable development in their industries and the acceptable solutions. Demands from poorer countries and critics outside the Summit for enforceable international rules to regulate the activities of transnational corporations were swept aside. Instead, the Summit endorsed a critical shift from Type-I treaties that are binding under international law to ‘Type-II stakeholder partnerships’ between the private sector, governments and selected (corporate-friendly) NGOs. This complements the UN Secretary-General’s much-criticised Global Compact whereby major corporations, such as Nike and Shell, are authorised to use the UN’s logo as a seal of approval in return for voluntary and self-policing ­compliance with UN standards on environmental protection, labour practices and human rights. At a time when business ethics and accountability are in tatters, and the corrupt practices of Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson, Vivendi and many more dominate the headlines, the position of the UN Secretary General has become seriously compromised.

 

The TNCs’ lobby, rebranded under names like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development, and Business Action for Sustainable Development, loudly proclaimed their conversion to social responsibility. A classic example of corporate ‘greenwashing’ was a report from the ‘prime movers’ in the WBCSD, the Chairmen of DuPont, Shell and Anova Holdings. In  Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development these leading industrialists argue that

not only is sustainable development good for business, the solving of environmental and social problems is essential for future growth. . . a global partnership—between governments, business and civil society—is essential, if accelerating moves towards globalization are to maximize opportunities for all—especially the world’s poor. The solution provided by Walking the Talk is to mobilize markets in favour of sustainability, leveraging the power of innovation and global markets for the benefits of everyone—not just the developed world. This means a further liberalization of the market—a move that would be condemned by anti-globalization protestors.[6]

 

Indeed! The New Zealand branch has eagerly embraced the new agenda. The NZ Herald reports that 50 senior company players attended a ‘Walking the Talk’ forum in Auckland in late September which ‘focused on the implications for business – and the opportunities – arising from the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg’.[7] More conferences are to come, presumably linked to the Labour government’s Third Way strategy of public/private partnerships.

 

Social responsibility has become code for corporations assuming more control over resources, not less. Privatisation of the financing, delivery and regulation of environmental creates lucrative new opportunities. The pathways to sustainable development of energy, housing and food and meeting targets for clean drinking water and sanitation were all market driven. Again, this leads straight back to the WTO. Current negotiations to extend the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) aim to increase market access for transnationals to countries’ core services. A related move mandated at the Doha ministerial, under pressure from the EC, explicitly aims to liberalise trade in environmental goods and services. Both moves feed, in turn, on World Bank ‘development’ plans and public private partnerships as the preferred vehicle. The stakes for transnationals like as Monsanto are enormous, as one of its senior executives explained in 1999:

what you are seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it’s really a consolidation of the entire food chain. Since water is as central to food production as seed is, and without water life is not possible, Monsanto is now trying to establish its control over water. During 1999, Monsanto plans to launch a new water business, starting with India and Mexico since both these countries are facing water shortages.[8]

 

The WSSD seal of approval will make it much harder for those countries, NGOs and people campaigning to prevent this happening and have water, food, housing and sanitation protected as human rights rather than tradeable commodities.

 

Further reinforcement of this repositioning came in the proposals for financing of sustainable development. The WSSD text promoted market-based, private sector financing through public/private partnerships, especially in the priority areas of water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity. It sat comfortably alongside the Bank’s Private Sector Development Strategy and the Bank’s role as lead agency in the Global Environmental Facility. It sat comfortably with the World Bank’s latest World Development Report: Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World.[9] There was no space for poor countries’ reality to intrude. The representative of St Lucia, speaking for the small island states, objected in vain that the ‘WTO has no soul’, and that the World Bank's demands that they place control of resources such as water and electricity in the hands of transnational companies made it impossible to implement their policies for renewable energy.[10]

 

The obvious alternative to enable states to finance these developments without dependency on the Bank or the transnationals—cancellation of unpayable and often unconscionable debt—had already been ruled out by the UN Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico in March 2002. There would be no new or additional funding to address the critical issues of disaster relief, ODA and debt cancellation beyond the much-criticised HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) initiative. The US had made it clear that bilateral aid would be tired to policy conditionalities. 'Sustained growth and poverty reduction is impossible without the right national policies. Where governments have implemented real policy changes, we will provide significant new levels of assistance'.[11]

 

Underpinning these concerns about the substance of the text was a deep disquiet that the UN’s comparatively open processes had been subverted at the preparatory stages and the summit itself by the kind of manipulation and backroom dealings that have discredited the WTO. Venezuela’s President Chavez, speaking for the Group of 77 poorer countries, condemned the Summit a ‘dialogue of the deaf’, and objected that most heads of state and governments had no influence on the Plan of Implementation. The Summit Declaration was first distributed just three days before the Summit, no meeting was held to discuss it and the revised draft was only circulated during the final plenary. Delegates familiar with the WTO expressed dismay that the infamously undemocratic Green Room process had crossed over to the usually open and participatory UN system, especially on the globalisation issue.[12]

 

Why should we in New Zealand be concerned about these developments? There are at least three related reasons:

 

1. There is a clear determination to subject social, environmental, cultural and developmental regulations to the rules and rulings of the WTO. This not only disempowers other international institutions that have a more balanced social mandate and could potentially develop alternative progressive models of development. It also makes the WTO the supreme body to determine and enforce global rules. 

 

It is important to understand the implications of this for international politics and law. Since the WTO was established in 1995 there have been consistent and well-documented complaints of bullying, manipulation and breaches of the WTO’s own rules by major governmental, institutional and private sector players. Before the fourth ministerial meeting of the WTO in Doha in November 2001, poorer countries were promised that their complaints about the democratic deficit at the WTO and the unfairness of agreements negotiated during the Uruguay Round would be addressed. Instead they faced a sustained campaign that was designed to break their resolve, foment division, and undermine the credibility of their negotiators in Geneva. This was a concerted response, facilitated by Director General Mike Moore, to successful moves by poorer countries to caucus more effectively, build their capacity and make strategic interventions through well-briefed ambassadors in Geneva. The Zimbabwean ambassador explains: The major countries realized they could not beat the Geneva process. Developing countries had built capacity in the Geneva process. Realising that they could not put their agenda through Geneva, they started to have meetings amongst a small group of members’.[13]

 

Two mini-ministerials were held for selected countries. These were designed to build a critical mass through bilateral deals that would make opposition harder to sustain. At the Doha meeting itself, the chair of the WTO General Council, Hong Kong’s ambassador Stuart Harbinson, tabled an unbracketed text of the Ministerial Declaration that indicated a consensus existed, where there was none. Poorer countries’ concerns had been excised. The need for ‘flexibility’ was invoked to break the WTO’s own procedural rules. Further ‘mini-ministerials’ and ‘Green Room’ meetings of selected countries that excluded the majority, went all night and were convened with little notice, if any. Those selected to chair the crucial committees were mostly ‘friends of the (new) round’. Those who remained resistant risked being labelled enemies of the US and friends of terrorism. Some ambassadors who stuck to their positions were ordered by their capitals to back down, after ‘diplomatic’ pressure on their governments from the US and others. By the time the Doha meeting ended, a day later than scheduled, back-room dealing had subordinated almost all the concerns of poorer countries to the demands of the major powers.

 

The small number of a  accredited NGOs present at Doha were quarantined from the real business of the meeting and outnumbered by the industry organisations and corporate lobbyists who attended as accredited ‘civil society’ representatives. Holding the meeting in Qatar ensured that there was no risk of disruption and only small, spontaneous and symbolic protests.

 

Since then the same arguments and behaviours have been evident at the UN-sponsored Conference on Financing of Development in Monterrey and the WSSD in Johannesburg. The APEC meeting in Mexico later this month will be focused on preparation for the next WTO ministerial meeting to be held in Cancun, Mexico in a year’s time. The parallel CEO’s Summit and APEC Business Advisory Council meetings will doubtless push hard for further endorsement of the public/private partnership agenda.

 

Back at the WTO in Geneva, poorer countries are attempting to assert their democratic right to establish rules and have them applied. In April some 15 poorer countries, led by India, submitted a paper to the WTO’s General Council. They demanded a preparatory process leading up to Cancun that was transparent and open-ended, and genuinely based on consensus, with any differences be clearly indicated. No draft ministerial declaration should be forwarded to the Ministerial Conference without consensus at the General Council.  Procedures at the ministerial meeting must be open-ended with proper notice and effective participation by all interested members. They insisted on having some clear procedural guidelines; but consultations promised for August have not yet occurred.  Since then a group led by Australia, and including New Zealand, has tabled a counter-paper advocating ‘flexibility’. They argue that ‘Prescriptive and detailed approaches to the preparatory process are inappropriate and will not create the best circumstances for consensus to emerge in the Cancun meeting’.[14]

 

A further bone of contention is the controversial appointment of Stuart Harbinson, the Chair of the General Council during the Doha meeting, as Chief of Staff to new Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi. Contrary to understandings that staff are not involved negotiations, he will continue to chair the pivotal Agriculture negotiations committee.

 

Bilateral pressures are already being reported from various countries, with several high profile developing country ambassadors being moved to other posts. The mini-ministerials have also now begun. The Australian government is hosting a meeting for 23 invited countries in Sydney on 14-15 November. Strong critics, notably India, are included; while India opposes such meetings, its ambassador says there is little choice but to attend and try to hold the line. The African countries that have been invited are US-friendly and can potentially break both the African Group and the Least-Developed Countries coalition. Agriculture is bound to be central to the discussions, with attempts to shore up the divided Cairns Group and sell its message to other countries.

 

This strategy may well succeed. If the US and EC can broker a deal like they did with the Uruguay Round that requires no real concessions from them and maximum concessions from everyone else, the major powers and their allies, including New Zealand, may be able to claim a victory. Any gains to countries like New Zealand are likely to be ideological rather than substantial, and will be secured by significant new concessions. And they will have achieved this pyrrhic victory within a chronically sick institution. If the WTO is allowed to extend its mandate with legitimation from forums like the WSSD, the international arena is going to become much more fractious, unstable and unjust.

 

2. These risks are heightened by the resurgence of US unilateralism on multiple fronts and the threat to punish any who resist. US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick was quick to condemn any country that opposed a new round of negotiations at the Doha Ministerial as giving comfort to the terrorists. The US continues to play this card. Bush’s latest PAX Americana blueprint the National Security Strategy, declares:


A strong world economy enhances our national security by advancing prosperity and freedom in the rest of the world. Economic growth supported by free trade and free markets creates new jobs and higher incomes. It allows people to lift their lives out of poverty, spurs economic and legal reform, and the fight against corruption, and it reinforces the habits of liberty.[15]

 

Meanwhile the US mocks any pretence of a global system of rules. As the Globe and Mail put it last week: In US practice, “free trade” means trade on US terms. It means forcing its way into markets for services, cultural products and government procurement. It means protectionism for domestic US industries with political clout’.[16] Recent measures, such as steel tariffs, the Farm Bill, the international corporate tax regime, and more indicate that Bush views the WTO with the same contempt as he has for other institutions. A more powerful WTO, both driven and undermined by aggressive US unilateralism, is a very real and frightening prospect.

 

3. A continuation of this process will ensure the WTO agenda is pursued without contest or debate. This is an agenda that intrudes way beyond the old GATT rules on trade across borders. In WTO-speak trade means not just merchandise and agriculture but covers essential services such as education, health, media and energy; food and professional standards; patenting of medicines, technology or biodiversity; environmental and biosecurity regulations; and much more. As the new Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi recently remarked: ‘We are now approaching a new era. The WTO is used to dealing with only external issues and now it is time to deal with the domestic regulations that impede trade liberalization.’[17]

 

What if the WTO, alongside the IMF and World Bank, locks every country into this model that doesn’t work? The eruptions that are occurring throughout South and Central America fundamentally challenge the belief, intrinsic to the WTO, that neoliberal and neoclassical economics can be de-linked from the social, economic, political contexts in which they are given effect. Even the Financial Times recently recognised the risk that people will rebel and confront their governments with social, economic and political crises that force them to rethink:

Latin America is in turmoil. In recent weeks, there have been anti-privatisation riots in Peru and Paraguay, violent strikes in Ecuador and financial crises in Brazil and Uruguay, . . . Argentina’s economic crisis continues to fester. The region’s creeping political contagion may be less virulent than the financial crisis of the 1990s, but could yet prove more damaging. More than a decade of market-friendly reforms, analysts fear, may be in peril.[18]

 

If we add to this volatile mix the global economic impact of US imperial pretensions and the pursuit of wars apparently without end, and the impact in the US itself, we have a very frightening scenario. A recent assessment suggests $200 billion would be siphoned from the US economy to pay for the war against Iraq if Germany refuses to endorse co-funding by the Europeans. Selwyn Manning of Scoop predicts the possible effect within the US:

Forget Medicaide, forget government assisted housing programmes, forget moves toward education equality, and most destructively, a predicted end through necessity to United States industrial protectionisms, removal of subsidies to heavy industry and commodity producers . . . Faced with economic collapse, the ‘American People’ would face failing consumerism, a domestic economy in freefall, societal chaos, and the further collapse of the United States’ pillar institutions’.[19]

 

Lest New Zealand’s free traders see this as a virtue, they should reflect on where that leaves a highly globalised New Zealand economy and its role as a cheerleader for this model within the WTO and at the UN.

 

Moves to extend the hegemony of the WTO, backed by New Zealand, are not sustainable. The turmoil that has engulfed South and Central America carries a timely warning - social and political crises can and do result when people say no to global free market policies and demand alternatives. Nor is it ethical – assuming such considerations have any place in international diplomacy these days. Presumably, the New Zealand government would claim it does; yet it is as deeply implicated in these abusive practices as the US and Australia. 

 

It is time that we as New Zealanders understood the broader implications of uncritical free trade evangelism and how that affects our position in other institutions, and demand that New Zealand takes a more ethical, balanced and socially responsible stance as an international good citizen. That means taking an international leadership role in opposing the war, even if it is backed by a cosmetic Security Council resolution, and promoting an alternative approach to sustainable development that empowers people to determine their futures and that endorses international action to constrain the destructive potential of global capital instead of giving it free rein.

 

____________________________________________

 

1. Washington Post, 20 September 2001

2. quoted in Third World Network report on WSSD, no2. www.twnside.org.sg

3. Vandana Shiva, ‘The Great Betrayal. Why civil society walked out and withdrew consent from WSSD’, 13 September 2002

4. Focus on Trade, no.81, September 2002, www.focusweb.org

5. http://www.econstrat.org/reconciling_in_the_WTO.htm

6. www.greenleaf-publishing.com/catalogue/walk.htm

7. Business Herald, 30 September 2002, emphasis added

8. quoted in Vandana Shiva, ‘Monsanto’s Expanding Monopolies’, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi, 1999

9. http://publications.worldbank.org/ecommerce/catalog/product?item_id=1017492.

10. Third World Network report on WSSD, no.1, www.twnside.org.sg

11. George W Bush, speech to Inter-American Development Bank, 14 March 2002, a component of the ‘National Security Strategy of the USA’, www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html

12. Third World Network Report on WSSD, no.2, www.twnside.org.sg

13. Aileen Kwa, ‘Laying the Foundation for Cancun: Another Doha “Success”?”, Focus, September 2002, www.focusweb.org

14. WT/GC/W/477, 28 June 2002

15. www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html

16. Globe and Mail, 25 September 2002

17. Xinhua 7 February 2002

18. 29 July 2002

19. Scoop, 25 September 2002



[1] Washington Post, 20 September 2001

[2] quoted in Third World Network report on WSSD, no2. www.twnside.org.sg

[3] Vandana Shiva, ‘The Great Betrayal. Why civil society walked out and withdrew consent from WSSD’, 13 September 2002

[4] Focus on Trade, no.81, September 2002, www.focusweb.org

[5] http://www.econstrat.org/reconciling_in_the_WTO.htm

[6] . www.greenleaf-publishing.com/catalogue/walk.htm

[7] Business Herald, 30 September 2002, emphasis added

[8] quoted in Vandana Shiva, ‘Monsanto’s Expanding Monopolies’, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi, 1999

[9]http://publications.worldbank.org/ecommerce/catalog/product?item_id=1017492.

[10] Third World Network report on WSSD, no.1, www.twnside.org.sg

[11] George W Bush, speech to Inter-American Development Bank, 14 March 2002, a component of the ‘National Security Strategy of the USA’, www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html

[12] Third World Network Report on WSSD, no.2, www.twnside.org.sg

[13] Aileen Kwa, ‘Laying the Foundation for Cancun: Another Doha “Success”?”, Focus, September 2002, www.focusweb.org

[14] WT/GC/W/477, 28 June 2002

[15] www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html

[16] Globe and Mail, 25 September 2002

[17] Xinhua 7 February 2002

[18] 29 July 2002

[19] Scoop, 25 September 2002