Editorial

The World Trade Organization and Cancun

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is planning to hold a summit meeting in Cancun, Mexico in mid-September. Anti-globalization activists throughout the Americas, as well as from Europe and elsewhere, are planning a mass mobilization to confront the WTO Summit and attempt to shut it down. However, regardless of their degree of success in this endeavour, there are strong indications that the WTO may not survive Cancun.

For at least the past 20 years, the WTO and its predecessor organization, the General Agreement on Tarriffs and Trade (GATT), have been grappling with the problem of agricultural tariffs and subsidies. Since the Second World War, the United States and various European countries have implemented massive programs to subsidize the export of their agricultural products to the rest of the world. This has enabled them to flood the world markets with cheap agricultural products, which, in turn, has devastated the domestic agricultural markets in the developing countries. Since those countries' economies are predominantly agrarian economies, the American and European agricultural subsidies have played a large part in the further impoverishment of the developing countries, which, in turn, makes these countries more vulnerable to control by the imperialist powers. The United States, in particular, has been using food as a weapon to dominate and control developing countries at least since the 1950s.

At the same time that they heavily subsidize their own agricultural sectors, the U.S. and the countries of the European Union (EU) have maintained high tariff barriers against various agricultural products exported by the developing countries. Meanwhile, they have been using the WTO to eliminate tariff barriers in the developing countries to products from the U.S. and EU. In other words, the "free trade" advocated by the U.S. and EU through such agencies as the WTO is a one-way street which benefits the imperialist countries and destroys the national economies of the developing world.

This contradiction between the U.S. and EU, on the one hand, and the developing countries, on the other, first emerged in full form at the Uruguay round of GATT trade talks which began in the mid-1980s. No overall agreement was reached, although the U.S. and EU "promised" to reduce their agricultural subsidies. However, no such reduction was implemented. At each subsequent trade summit, the issue was put back on the agenda, the U.S. and EU "promised" to reduce their subsidies and then reneged on their promises. Meanwhile, each round of talks saw the further erosion of protection of the economies of the developing countries from the predatory trade practices of the U.S. and EU. As recently as the Doha Summit of the WTO, held in Qatar, the U.S. and EU promised to take drastic measures to reduce their agricultural subsidies prior to the next WTO Summit to be held in Cancun this year. Of course, once again they have done nothing to actually implement their promises at Doha. The mini-Summit of the WTO held in Montreal last month was supposed to draft a comprehensive agreement on agricultural subsidies in preparation for the full Summit in Mexico.

This has set the stage for a showdown at Cancun. Various developing countries, most notably Brazil and India, have indicated that they will not permit the U.S. and EU get away with any more foot-dragging on the issue of agricultural subsidies. At the same time, the U.S. and EU have to date consistently refused to dismantle their subsidy programs. If an agreement on subsidy reductions is not reached in Cancun, this conflict has the potential to destroy the WTO.

There are some voices of alarm within the anti-globalization movement, especially amongst the NGOs, at the prospect of the imminent demise of the WTO. They caution that, despite its flaws, the WTO represents a moderating influence on the U.S. and EU and is therefore better than nothing. This argument flies in the face of the actual experience of the world's people and raises questions about just how anti-globalization these organizations really are. It exposes the fact that they are not really opposed to imperialist globalization, just to its "excesses". In other words, what they are really opposed to is the resistance of the world's peoples to imperialist domination and plunder.

Modern Communism is of the opinion that the demise of the WTO would constitute a great victory for the world's peoples. It would mean the end of one of the main instruments of imperialist domination of the world. If the U.S. and EU react to the new situation by intensifying their predatory trade practices on a bilateral basis, so be it. This will, in turn, generate a new wave of anti-imperialist resistance in those countries which are victimized by these practices. In will also encourage various countries to band together into their own trading blocs to provide them with greater leverage in dealing with the imperialist powers. In other words, the contradictions both between the imperialist powers and between imperialism and the oppressed nations and peoples of the world will be further intensified by the collapse of the WTO. This, in turn, weakens the imperialist system, strengthens the forces of anti-imperialist resistance and brings the world imperialist system one step closer to a generalized crisis. Only those who fear an end to imperialism can oppose such a development.