Speaking at a World Trade Organization symposium in Geneva
this week, Professor Jane Kelsey from Auckland University and ARENA (Action,
Research and Education Network of Aotearoa) has condemned the torturous process
of accession as ‘one of the WTO’s dirty little secrets’.
“While all eyes are fixed on whether the Doha Round will
kick into life again, most of what the WTO’s poorer countries are trying to
stop has already been forced, arrogantly and invisibly, onto some of the
world’s smallest, poorest and most vulnerable countries.”
‘Nothing mocks the claim to a Doha ‘development’ agenda, and
delegitimates the WTO even further, than the power politics of accession.’
In her paper on the current accession processes of Vanuatu,
Samoa and Tonga, she singled out Australia, New Zealand and the US for making
unconscionable demands that far exceed those required of existing WTO members,
even the rich ones.
The deal New Zealand extracted from Tonga will promote
further dumping of cheap, low quality exports, such as mutton flaps, which the
World Health Organization has blamed for the escalation of diet-related
disease, while NZAID pours more money into health related programmes.
Professor Kelsey quoted the objections of a senior Samoan
negotiator that the supposedly ‘rules based organization’ has no rules.
Others who were intimately involved in Vanuatu’s stalled
accession go further: ‘the accession process has no rules, except precedent and
power, and is the very antithesis of what the members publicly state to be the
intention and design of the WTO’.
‘This is not
about development. It is bizarre to suggest that these Islands will benefit
commercially within a global free market.’
‘The real
explanation, admitted by some supporters, is to lock them into neoliberal
policies that the IMF, Asian Development Bank and Australia and New Zealand are
foisting on them.’
‘The Pacific
Islands have nothing to gain and everything to lose from joining a club that
has the potential to devastate their economies, cultures and societies, and
create enormous instability and turmoil in an already unstable region’,
Professor Kelsey told the symposium.
Contact: Professor Jane Kelsey 021 765 055
(The paper ‘Acceding Countries as Pawns in a Power Play: A
Case Study of the Pacific Islands’ is available at www.arena.org.nz/pacwto.htm)