In touching on the multilateral trade system at various points, the NEPAD document makes references to the "absence of fair and just rules" [para 33] and the "unfavourable terms of trade" facing Africa [para 34], and it even mentions the "biases in economic policy and instability in world commodity prices" that affect Africa negatively [para 132] . It calls for "active participation" by African leaders [para 169] to ensure "(o)pen, predictable" market access for Africa's exports [para 170], the usual code words referring to the multilateral system of trade under WTO rules. In section VI on "A New Global Partnership" NEPAD declares that "African leaders envisage the following responsibilities and obligations of the developed countries and multilateral institutions"; including, inter alia, their 'obligation' to "negotiate more equitable terms of trade for African countries within the multilateral framework" [para 188]. NEPAD is, therefore, encouraging an active engagement by African governments within the multilateral system of rules and regulations being created by and implemented under the WTO.
BUT
-
In the half dozen brief sentences/clauses focused specifically on the multilateral system and the
WTO, NEPAD exhibits an inadequate grasp of the nature, complex functioning and effects of this system. Despite some earlier passing observations on the inequities of the global system (see 9 below), NEPAD welcomes "the new trading opportunities that emerge from the evolving multilateral trading system" [para 169]. This new system is 'evolving' and has been given an enormous boost through the Uruguay Round Agreements (URAs) that were created out of the GATT round of negotiations, finalised in April 1994. But, already in the penultimate stages of that round, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) calculated and warned that, despite the predicted vast expansion of global trade, Africa would actually lose out to the tune of some US$ 2.5 billion to US$3 billion in the years immediately following. This has since been born out in practice, and even accepted, in general terms, in studies by other 'reputable' mainstream institutions, such as the World Bank and the OECD.
-
In the years following the signing of the dozens of URAs, and the establishment of the WTO in
1995, it soon became clear to governments throughout the 'developing' world - as they tried to implement these agreements, and as the detailed terms of the URAs were subject to meticulous examination by both governmental and independent trade lawyers and development analysts - that there were gross imbalances, deficiencies and inconsistencies within and between the
respective agreements6. These not only militated against the interests and needs of the developing countries but reflected the pervasive bias towards the interests
of the most developed7. NEPAD, however, simply refers to the need for the rules and regulations of the WTO to be implemented [para 169] and makes no mention of the almost one hundred specific 'implementation issues' relating to problems within virtually all the URAs. The governments of the developing countries, individually and collectively, have been trying over the past five years to make these issues the priority matters on the agenda of the WTO for "review, revision and rectification"; only to be intransigently blocked by the more powerful players in the WTO, particularly the notorious Quad consisting of 'The Majors', the EU, the US, Canada and Japan.
Even in so far as it mentions problems of 'implementation', NEPAD does not in any way bring out the fact that these are not only about the difficulties facing the weaker developing countries, especially in Africa, in 'implementing ' the legal and institutional requirements of the WTO. It is such 'failures' that the powerful governments and the WTO Secretariat constantly criticise. At the same time, again like the latter, NEPAD ignores the fact that it is the most powerful industrialised country governments, themselves, that have tactically avoided implementing those URA terms that they consider to be inimical to their interests. On the part of the US this is particularly blatant in that country's skilful evasion of its UR undertakings to remove its tariff and quote restrictions on textile and clothing exports from developing countries. With regard to both the US and the EU such protectionism is most notoriously evident in their resistance to removing agricultural production and export subsidies. NEPAD diplomatically avoids any explicit mention of this.
-
These countries - the proposed 'partners in Africa's development - have also postponed the fulfilment of their undertakings to provide financial and technical assistance to the LDCs and other countries that would (or that the Quad insisted "might") be adversely affected by the new global regime. Such compensatory measures were promised by the powerful governments at the last moment before the signing of the Treaty of Marrakesh that concluded the UR. These were part of the quid pro quo terms of the 'deal' to secure the acceptance of the whole UR package - about which many developing country governments had strong reservations, even at that stage. Such evasive strategies and tactics by the rich and powerful governments reinforce serious doubts about their preparedness for an honest and supportive 'partnership' with Africa. But, NEPAD's failure to point to the tendentious maneuvers and blatant failures of the governments of the richest countries in the WTO points, once again, to the political constraints placed on the promoters of 'partnership' with such governments.
-
Alternatively, or additionally, it can be concluded that the technical formulators and political promoters of NEPAD are unaware of such outrageous abuses. But, if they are so unaware, then it has to be said that they are ill-equipped to formulate a historic strategy for the whole of Africa. For example, NEPAD blandly suggests that the expansion of the WTO "must recognise and provide for the African continent's special concerns, needs and interests in future WTO rules" [para 169]. It repeatedly calls on African Heads of State to ensure this [para 169], and urges them to persuade the developed countries to "negotiate more equitable terms of trade for African countries within the WTO multilateral framework" [para 188]. But the writers of NEPAD patently fail to understand the real nature of the WTO as an extremely tough negotiations arena where ruthless hard bargaining is driven by powerful corporate and national vested interests, not the polite diplomatic positioning or posturing of Heads of State. And, with the WTO Secretariat clearly biased towards the interests and demands of the most powerful member states, and the expansion of the liberalised global trade regime, the WTO is not a neutral open forum or assembly of nations where world leaders gather to debate and 'influence' each other's positions.
-
On the other hand, in addressing itself to African Heads of State in this connection, NEPAD also fails to acknowledge that it is precisely the political leaders of African countries, far removed from the realities and extreme complexities of the WTO negotiations in Geneva, that frequently undermine African efforts in the WTO. This is because many top political leaders in Africa are far more susceptible to the pressures and persuasions of their Northern aid and trade 'partners', who are known to contact them directly and 'confidentially' outside of the negotiations processes and behind the backs of the African negotiators on the front line, in order to counter and undermine African negotiating positions and negotiators. Even many African trade, industry, agricultural, environmental and other ministers are often less in touch than their own WTO negotiators are with the full complexities of the negotiating issues and arguments, and the delicate tactical positionings and strategic alliances being created in Geneva.
-
Such disjunctures and divisions within and between African governments, between the negotiating teams in Geneva and their home ministries, and between detailed technical, legal and economic arguments on the one hand, and broad political/diplomatic positions, on the other hand, are also clearly evident in NEPAD's approach to the WTO. It refers to "strategic areas of intervention" in the abstract [para 171] but does not, for example, acknowledge the concrete Africa Group positions in Geneva, such as their comprehensive and ground-breaking proposals on the review and revisions of the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPs)8, or on the Agreement on Agriculture. This latter has direct implications for NEPAD's agricultural development projects, but it may be that it is ignored in this document because South Africa identifies with the Cairns Group of big agricultural exporting countries, led by Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Chile and other larger, more developed countries in the WTO. Nor (not surprisingly) does NEPAD acknowledge the even more advanced positions of many Third World peasant organisations and small farmer organisations (even in the North), and development NGOs, South and North, arguing that small-scale agriculture, and production for food security and food sovereignty be placed outside of the demands and trade disciplines of the WTO.
-
But NEPAD's failure to endorse, or even acknowledge, the specific collective Africa positions in the WTO, may also reflect the position of the
South African government9 towards the Africa Group in Geneva, and SA representatives' distance, and independent interventions apart from the officially endorsed positions of the whole of Africa. The major difference between South Africa and the jointly agreed African positions - both for the 4th WTO Ministerial in Seattle, in December 1999, and the 5th Ministerial in Doha, in November 2001 - is that Africa officially opposed the introduction of a range of 'new issues' for negotiation in the WTO, whereas South Africa's official position was to accept most of these as legitimate and necessary bargaining issues. In this way, too, the issue of Industrial Tariff Liberalisation in the WTO, that the joint African position opposes, is nonetheless subtly alluded to in NEPAD as the need for "further liberalisation in manufacturing" [para 171]. It would seem that South Africa has also tried to use the NEPAD programme to gain endorsement - in what is a key African document - for the introduction of a multilateral investment agreement into the WTO. This is carefully coded as "transparency and predictability as a precondition for increased investment" [para 170], and offered as a trade-off with the governments of the industrialised countries "in return for boosting supply side capacity and enhancing the gains from existing market access". It has to be seen how the Africa Group in Geneva and African governments in general will respond to this NEPAD ploy. It is, furthermore, not lost on other African countries that South Africa - with its banks, private companies and even parastatal corporations keenly looking for investment opportunities in Africa and elsewhere - has its own 'national interests' in promoting the kind of 'global rights' of corporations in all countries and (almost all) sectors that an investment agreement in the WTO is aimed at.
-
In response to African complaints about the pressures of the day-to-day functioning of the WTO, and especially the extreme difficulties that a complex new round of negotiations would confront them with, NEPAD proposes "technical assistance and support to enhance the institutional capacities of African states to use the WTO and to engage in multilateral trade negotiations" [para 170]. Such offers are a standard Quad and WTO Secretariat inducement and misleading reassurance to African governments in order to get them to accept proposals contrary to their own considered judgements. After the recent Doha Ministerial, South Africa proudly reported that it had obtained "a strong commitment" by the powerful countries to provide such technical assistance; an expectation flying in the face of their long-standing failures to fulfil such promises. It also ignores the fact that many countries had and have objections to the nature and implications of the new issues, and the dangers of the proposed expansion of the remit of the WTO. Their problem is not merely one of 'lack of capacity' to understand or negotiate the issues. But the further problem with such 'technical' assistance is that it is never neutral, and the content of the instructions and advice given will reflect the opinions and orientations of the pro-WTO institutions and agencies providing the 'capacity building'.
-
Alongside the failure of NEPAD to take up and support specific established African positions in a and on the WTO, there is another omission in the NEPAD plan that is particularly significant in a document that claims to be providing the guidelines and basis for regional integration between and development within the countries of Africa. NEPAD is totally silent is on the terms and constraints imposed on 'regional trade arrangements' (RTAs), as they are defined by the WTO. These constraints are designed to ensure that RTAs do not 'raise barriers that discriminate against third parties' in the world economy. And countries in regional economic communities, such as those in Africa, are further advised to lower their individual and collective tariff provisions, and remove other external 'barriers', in order to 'integrate into the global' 'for their own good'. What this means, in practice, is that the kind of preferential trade terms and common external tariffs that such groupings of countries might wish to use for their mutual benefit, and to in order reduce heavy pressures from external 'third parties' [as described in 6 above], are severely limited by the WTO's Article 24. Even the African Ministers of Trade call for this contentious article to be reviewed and revised in terms of the development needs and aims within African Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and on the basis of the 'special and differential terms' (SDTs) that the WTO supposedly allows for the special needs of LDCs and other developing countries. The aim of improving and using such potential WTO 'rights' to legally secure the REC's as effective 'spaces' for internal and intra-African development utilise the legal terms and are situated within processes in the WTO, and they are hardly radical positions. Yet NEPAD's perspective on Africa's engagement with the global economy does not even extend to this.
-
Although NEPAD ignores the details of Africa's officially agreed positions on the WTO, the writers of the NEPAD programme have had to take care not to be seen to be explicitly supporting the launch of a new multi-sectoral round of WTO negotiations. Thus NEPAD carefully suggests that "if " a new round of multilateral trade negotiations is started [para 169], African countries must be prepared. But it also states, without qualification, that African governments must, and do, give "broad-based support" to the WTO [para 171]; whereas many African government ministers and even more government officials, and most African civil society organisations engaged on issues around the WTO, are very dissatisfied with the both the substance and the modus operandii or functioning of the WTO. NEPAD, however, encourages African governments to see the WTO as a level "forum in which developing countries can collectively put up their demands." [para 170], and does not point to the extreme difficulties the governments of Africa and the rest of the developing world face in engaging with the powerful governments in formal and informal WTO negotiations. This is due not only to the imbalances of power between the different players but to the un-transparent, inaccessible, exclusionary and thoroughly undemocratic nature of this organisation, and the blatant bias within the WTO Secretariat towards the demands of the global powers and the assumptions of the neo-liberal trade paradigm. Yet, although NEPAD, makes, at least, one small mention of the need for reform in the multilateral finance institutions [para 188.12], there is no equivalent reference to the equally urgent need for reform of the WTO; let alone to the proposals from civil society organisations for the closure of all these undemocratic 'multilateral' institutions which together have assumed the role of a new system of de facto global government.
9. NEPAD and the 'integration' of Africa into the global economy
In all the above positions, NEPAD is seriously lacking in its apparent grasp of the nature of the WTO. This is not merely a trade institution but a new global executive body, and the central component of an emerging but undeclared system of global government. The WTO is the main institutional instrument for the restructuring and (re)regulation of an emerging globalised economy. NEPAD is similarly lacking in its understanding and characterisation of the processes of 'globalisation', and this is reflected in its proposals on how Africa should relate to these processes.
In its introductory contextualising section dealing with the globalising world economy [paras 1-41] NEPAD does make some critical comments on the "increased costs" imposed by globalisation on "Africa's ability to compete" [para 28], and observes correctly that the costs of global processes "have been born disproportionately by Africa" [para 30]. It even notes that "in the absence of fair and just rules" globalisation has "increased the ability of the strong to the detriment of the weak" [para 33], and that "increasing polarisation of wealth and poverty is one of the number of processes that have accompanied globalisation" [para 35]. These remarks are testimony to the extent to which even the writers of NEPAD have been affected by the exposure by UN agencies, above all the UNDP and UNCTAD, of the uneven, polarising and destabilising impact of globalisation. These and other 'revelations' about the 'negative as well as the positive effects of globalisation' have even entered into mainstream discourse. This also reflects, and may be an attempt to outflank, the wide-ranging and increasingly influential criticisms from the international peoples movements leveled against the anti-democratic, divisive and damaging effects of neo-liberal governmental and corporate-driven globalisation on people and communities throughout the world, and the world.
However, the greater influence of other agencies, such as the World Bank, on the NEPAD writers' fundamental approach to globalisation are expressed in the more pervasive views in the NEPAD document endorsing globalisation on the grounds of "the unparalleled opportunities that globalisation has offered to some previously poor countries" [para 40], and that "pursuit of greater openness of the global economy has created opportunities for lifting millions of people out of poverty" [para 32]. The significant centrality of such views in NEPAD are evident from its opening statement deploring the "malaise of under-development" in Africa caused by its "exclusion" from the globalising world [para 1]. The supposition that the "marginalisation" of Africa from the processes of globalisation has been the cause of its underdevelopment [para 2], and that "Africa's potential has been untapped because of its limited integration into the global economy" [para 16] runs throughout this document [paras 26, 33, 50, 52, 55 et passim]. Thus, in NEPADs view, what Africa needs is to end its 'marginalisation' and "rapidly integrate" into the global economy [para 35]. NEPAD argues not only that globalisation is the de facto "context" but that it "provides the means for Africa's rejuvenation" [para 28].
There are a number of profound misconceptions in NEPAD's approach to globalisation and Africa's location within it, and thus misdirections on what should be done:
-
The so-called 'marginalisation' of Africa is the first misconception in NEPAD, and is actually an inversion of the realities of Africa's location in the international capitalist economy. NEPAD accepts the views of neo-liberal agencies, such as the World Bank, that Africa's internal problems and 'inhospitable policy environment' cause it to be 'marginalised' from the beneficial effects of international flows of investment and trade. On the face of it, Africa does have a minuscule share of about 1% of international trade and receives an equally minute percentage of the flows of international capital. Whether 'more' would necessarily be 'better', as NEPAD unquestioningly accepts, is a highly debatable matter born out by long experience and analysis. But the most fundamental problem for Africa is not its exclusion but rather the longstanding, subordinate and exploited nature of its inclusion in a profoundly assymetrical international economy, from its enforced 'integration' into international circuits of trade and finance through colonisation down to the present day. As Samir Amin, the eminent Africa economist, observes "The concept of marginalisation is a false one which hides the real questions, which are not 'to which degree the various regions are integrated' but rather the ways
in which they are integrated"10.
-
The consequent necessity, according to NEPAD, for the "rapid integration' of Africa [para 52] into the global economy completely misses the significance of the existing forms and the extent of the integration of Africa into the global economy. African countries are deeply dependent upon and locked into the workings of the global economy. Their economies are characterised by contrived and excessive extroversion [turning outwards] to international markets, with extremely limited internal backward and forward trade and production linkages within, let alone between, African economies. The more commercialised sectors of African production are heavily externally oriented; and, at an average of 43% of GDP (and more than 50% in LDCs), trade carries a much great weight in African economies than in the supposedly highly globally-integrated industrialised economies (where external trade has an average weight of only 20% of their GDPs). Clearly, it is not external trade per se but the role of trade within multi-layered, multi-dimensional, internally integrated and largely self-sustaining economies that should be the prime concern. The basic character of most African countries is that they are internally disarticulated and are mainly shallow 'trading economies'; whereas they need to be transformed into rounded, internally integrated and more soundly-based production economies. This concern is reflected to a considerable extent in the AAF-SAP and AEC approach, in contrast with NEPAD's overriding concern with the expansion of 'efficient' production to feed into 'competitive' external trade.
-
In NEPAD's view liberalisation and openness [para 32] are the main instruments for the expansion of trade within Africa and between Africa and the rest of the world, and such 'openness' is the means and measure of Africa's 'integration' into the global economy. This misses the fact that it is the extensive liberalisation of the external trade and investment policies of most countries in Africa, imposed under structural adjustment programmes, that have been major factors in the de-industrialisation, economic decline and social crises in Africa. It is the enforced 'opening up' of African economies that has made them even more vulnerable to damaging external pressures and reinforced foreign controls and increased influences within their economies. The formulations in NEPAD point, indirectly, to the fact that neo-liberal injunctions about 'integration into' are actually and very dangerously about 'opening up to' the global economy, meaning the highly competitive trading forces and self-serving investment interests emanating from the rest of the world.
-
In so far as NEPAD notes the polarisation or "widening wealth-poverty gap" within and between countries in the 'globalised' world, it refers to such growing inequalities and inequities as being amongst the outcomes "accompanying" globalisation [para 35]. In fact, such patterns are not coincidental, nor are they incidental side-effects of globalisation. They are intrinsic to the globalisation of 'free market' economies. While enabling and encouraging the already strong, well-endowed, well-placed, favoured, fortunate - or ruthless - to prosper, the removal of protective regulations for the more vulnerable, in order to allow 'open' competition, simultaneously plays upon and intensifies the disadvantages of the weaker countries, communities, and social groups. Such uneven effects and social and economic imbalances are intensified and magnified under conditions of unfettered globalised competition. These polarising effects between and within countries (including the richest, such as the USA) have been powerfully and authoritatively documented in the UNDP's Human Development Reports throughout the 1990s. The 'survival of the fittest' and 'the devil take the hindmost' have always been, and are now more than ever, the two sides of the coin of capitalist ideology and practice. Thus, contrary to NEPAD's statement that "there is nothing inherent in the process of globalisation that automatically reduces poverty and inequality" [para 40], it is more correct to state that there is much that is inherent in the uncontrolled globalisation of capitalism that automatically increases unemployment, human marginalisation, poverty and inequality throughout the world.
-
In the context of such growing inequalities - which it cannot fail to see between Africa and the rest of the world - NEPAD's response is not to question this system but to suggest a more effectively managed integration of the world [para 28]. This would create more "fair and just rules" [para 33] to ensure a "more equitable and sustainable" development in Africa [para 52] and the world. According to NEPAD, this effective management through "the cooperation of governments and private institutions" will ensure that the "benefits of globalisation are more equitably spread" [para 40]. NEPAD's writers see that "governments - particularly those in the developed world - have, in partnership with the private sector, played an important role in shaping the form content and course of globalisation" [para 39]. In this, NEPAD is correct in noting that it is not just 'science and technology' that drives globalisation but political and economic forces. What it does not seem to understand is that globalisation reflects the intrinsic expansionary needs of the most highly industrialised economies, and is essential to the very functioning of the capitalist system. The driving motivation for the alliance between the governments of the industrialised economies and their global corporations has been, and is, to restructure international economic relations and re-regulate both international and national economic policies, as required, in order to optimise their advantages and maximise their access and rights all over the world. Thus the 'form, content and course' of globalisation has been determined by, and in the interests of the very forces that NEPAD seems to believe will cooperate in the creation of a more just global system. This reflects and is part and parcel of NEPAD's entire belief in its capacity to persuade such neo-liberal and thoroughly self-serving governments (particularly the unilateralist global superpower, the USA) into a 'new partnership' with Africa. This presupposes a far-sightedness and preparedness of such short-sighted, deeply prejudiced and totally self-serving and corporate-serving governments to compromise their own economic interests and needs in any real way in order to respond in the interests of Africa…. humanity…. or the world.
-
In the same vein, NEPAD fails to point to the policies and role of the rich and powerful countries
in actively contributing to and even creating Africa's extreme problems. To the contrary, NEPAD seems to attribute Africa's failure to 'benefit' from 'globalisation' to factors and failures within African economies and societies. Thus NEPAD identifies the "low level of economic activity" in African countries "creating a self-perpetuating cycle" that "severely weakens Africa's capacity to participate in the globalisation process, leading to further marginalisation" [para 35]. It also goes into some of the detail of the interaction of internal factors in "Africa's peripheral and diminishing role in the world economy" [para 26 ]. There are some elements of truth in such observations about internal weaknesses in Africa [para 18], but such 'explanations' fail to point also to powerful external factors, such as national protectionism in the industrialised economies and their external trade strategies that have deliberately blocked African trade access and undermined its potential to move up the ladder of productive development [see above]. Nor do NEPAD's references to the negative effects of colonialism in Africa touch more than superficially on the profound social disruptions, economic distortions and structural imbalances created in Africa during the process [para 21]. In fact, NEPAD diplomatically skips over the long decades of direct and destructive neo-colonial economic, political and military interventions by the major powers in 'post-colonial' Africa that targeted and actively undermined or deliberately destroyed any African efforts to introduce national economic strategies to deal effectively with their internal weaknesses, transform their societies, and definitively end their external subordination and exploitation. NEPAD clearly believes in their will and capacity now to be disinterested partners to Africa.
Footnotes:
-
B.L.Das, former negotiator for India in GATT, "The WTO Agreements - Deficiencies, Imbalances and Required Changes" in Trade and Development Issues Series of the Third World Network, Penang, Malaysia, 1998
-
This is even recognised today in some quite mainstream newspapers, such as the Financial Times in London, 10-11/11/2001, and even the conservative Business Day in Johannesburg, Editorial of 7/11/2001.
-
Although this ground-breaking position paper has gained civil society support throughout the world and even widespread endorsement by other developing country governments within WTO processes.
-
See "The Official Position and Role of South Africa in Promoting the WTO", AIDC, Cape Town, May 2002
-
S. Amin, Director of the Third World Forum, Dakar, "Africa: living on the fringe", New Agenda South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy, # 7, p 20; Cape Town, Third Quarter 2002
|
Related documents