ISGN > Publications > WTO and TRADE

UNCTAD X STATEMENT
BY Professor Yash Tandon
Director, THE INTERNATIONAL SOUTH GROUP NETWORK (ISGN)

Your Excellency, President of UNCTAD X Excellencies Ladies and Gentlemen.

I wish first to thank UNCTAD for giving us this opportunity to address its Tenth Session here in Bangkok. ISGN is one among several NGOs that are addressing this body. It is a testimony to UNCTAD's commitment to open its doors to civil society and to engage in debates that go beyond the confines of intergovernmental negotiations. We believe that this kind of interactionis of considerable mutual benefit.

Mr. President, the International South Group Network (ISGN) is a network of several community based organisations, peoples' movements, and academic organisations in the South. We are committed to advance the struggle of peoples all over for a world that is just, peaceful and democratic, and that helps to release the potential (but presently suppressed) creativity of the ordinary people of the world. The ISGN was founded in June 1994 at the historically famous University of Fort Hare in South Africa. We work with minimal human resources located in five centres: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, the Philippines and Nicaragua. We have a vast range of activities. These include promoting land reform and food security in the countries in the South, developing and strengthening the struggle for gender equality, promoting human rights especially those enshrined in several United Nations conventions, encouraging grassroots initiatives aimed at conflict resolution, and raising and analysing matters that relate to the South-North relations, such as debt, trade, development, governance and the environment.

One of our activities of interest to UNCTAD is related to facilitating and developing the capacity of African trade negotiators to deal with issues that come up for negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This project is called the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Initiative (SEATINI). We have been working on this now for nearly three years. In the run up to the Second and the Third WTO Ministerial meetings (in Geneva and Seattle respectively) SEATINI held workshops at which senior African trade negotiators were able to collectively analyse the issues on the agenda of the global trade regime, and to work out common positions on these. The ISGN provided the facilitative mechanism at which the trade negotiators owned the processes and the outcome of their deliberations. SEATINI issues a fortnightly Bulletin and has an interactive Network. These processes, we believe, have contributed to build a self-conscious, confident and informed body of negotiators in Southern and Eastern Africa who are able to articulate their concerns in a more positive and constructive manner than was the case when the Uruguay Agreements were signed at Marrakesh and at the Singapore ministerial. We wish to take this opportunity to thank both UNCTAD and UNDP for the support we have received for this project.

Mr. President, we believe that the efforts of UNCTAD, whilst positive and very helpful, have not gone far enough in addressing issues of concern to the people of the South. Frankly, we are disappointed at the outcome of the current (10th) Session of UNCTAD. The Plan of Action is a compromise between demands of justice on the one hand and those of power and privilege on the other. Whilst we do not expect overnight justice, we do expect that UNCTAD moves in the direction that would eventually bring justice to the people of the third world. We do not think UNCTAD's Draft Plan of Action is pointing in the right direction. The very first sentence of the Draft is problematic. It reads, and I quote,

"Globalization and interdependence have opened new opportunities, through increased trade liberalization and advancement in technology, for the growth of the world economy and development."

Mr. President, if this is the wisdom of UNCTAD then it is wisdom not based on evidence. There is no proof that Globalization has opened new opportunities for the development of the peoples of the South. The missing adjective here is "Corporatist". Contrary to the statement in the Draft Plan of Action, there is increasing evidence that Corporatist Globalization has resulted in further marginalization of the poor of the world, further impoverishment of the developing countries and even more so of the least developing countries, and further polarisation of the world between the rich nations and the poor nations, and within nations between the poor and the rich. What kind of an "opportunity" is it, Mr. President, when the peoples of the South are emburdened with a debt of US$ 30 billion which is not only not payable under any circumstances but also manifestly unjust and in most cases illegitimate? What kind of "opportunity" is it when the terms of trade of the countries of the South have been facing a long-term secular decline? If trade liberalization is such a good thing, why is that the European countries have fought tooth and nail even before the Uruguay Agreements and since then to protect their agriculture? It is clear, Mr.President, that when the West talks about "globalization" they mean protection for themselves and liberalisation of the markets for the South.

In other words, Mr. President, the very first sentence of UNCTAD's Draft Plan of Action is based on an empirically unsubstantiated assumption. As a representative of an NGO not involved in the negotiations, I can be bold enough to say that the statement is based on a lie. Why this blatant lie should be perpetrated in document of this nature must have something to do with the nature of UNCTAD and the nature of the compromises that are made during the course of the negotiations. Clearly, those who are gaining from the process of globalization and from selective liberalisation had an upper hand in the drafting of that statement than those who are losing from those processes. The opening of the G77 countries' Draft Plan of Action was more circumspect and allowed for a more open-ended possibility. It read, and I quote:

With the acceleration of the pace of globalization in the early 1990s came the expectation that growth and development based on global market forces would be more rapid, more sustainable and more widely shared than in the past, allowing developing countries to narrow the gap with industrial countries and the poorest sections of society to close the income gap with the rich. However, the empirical record has until now fallen short of this expectation.

How did it happen that the Draft Plan of Action came to put forward a viewpoint that is contradicted by evidence? It would appear that a blatant untruth is written into document as a means of getting the consensus of those without whose money and power UNCTAD would probably disappear. Money and power talk to the extent of belying the truth about globalization from the people of the world.

If our analysis is correct, then it follows that UNCTAD is driven not by concerns of development of the countries of the South, as claimed by it, but by forces of the North that wish to keep their stranglehold over the South through an enslaving debt burden and a structured, built-in mechanism in the global trading system for perpetuating a declining terms of trade for the South. Coming from an NGO, I do not apologise for saying this, Mr. President. Why? Because if nobody points a finger at the nudity of the UNCTAD King marching in the streets of Bangkok then everybody would accept the first sentence of the Draft Plan of Action and believe that the King was wearing an elegant suit that only those without faith cannot see.

We are disappointed, Mr. President, not only at the manner in which truth is sacrificed to the demands of real politik in the Draft Plan of Action, but also in the manner in which the UNCTAD Secretariat seeks knowledge. We are reminded time and again by the officials of UNCTAD that it is a "knowledge-based" and "ideas-based" organisation. If that is true, then the relevant question to ask is where does the UNCTAD Secretariat get its ideas? They get their mandate from the compromised Plans of Action, yes, but from where do they get their ideas? It turns out that they get their ideas from the "knowledge" of scholars that are based in the citadels of "learning" in Western Universities. UNCTAD's whole programme of action, indeed raison detre, is couched largely in economistic terms. And the economistic rationale for its programme of action is put in the language of Western or Western oriented economists.

There is no better evidence of this than the Round Table symposium of Economists organised by the Secretariat at UNCTAD X. Ten out of eleven speakers came from the North, only one from the South. It would seem that "knowledge" is as defined by those who come from the Oxford University and the Institute of Development Studies in the UK, the MIT and Harvard in the USA and from the officials of the World Bank. It is a mocking irony on the fate of history that the countries that have been largely responsible for the underdevelopment of the South should be asked to produce the "knowledge" that is supposed then to take the South out of the crisis of development. It is also, incidentally, an insult to the intelligence of the South. It is no gainsaying that almost all the economists based their analysis on neo-classical, neo-liberal economics. In other words, there was no dialogue. A monologue based on a one-Party rule of one ideology reigns the "knowledge-based" institution of UNCTAD.

Such are the limits of UNCTAD. Constrained by a Plan of Action based on a lie that had to be negotiated in order to protect the interests of the rich and powerful, and based on "knowledge" coming from outdated economistic theories, UNCTAD is in a serious bind. The question is: can it get out of it?

Yes, it can. Two actions are necessary for this to happen. One is that the countries of the South must speak up a bit more boldly. If globalization is not such a wonderful thing, as indeed the G77 countries said in their initial proposal to UNCTAD, then they should stick by their statement and not compromise the truth for the sake of pacifying the rich and the powerful. Since they have done that in UNCTAD X they are authors of their own further victimisation. Nobody is to blame but themselves for bending truth to power. The second action is by the UNCTAD Secretariat. They need to understand where knowledge comes from. Knowledge, especially knowledge for liberation, comes not from books, and certainly not from books written by Oxford and Harvard dons, but from practical experience of those who are struggling on the ground. A little more "reality-check" by UNCTAD staff by examining the knowledge that comes from the ground, from the experiences of the people, may be needed to counterbalance the uniform, economistic, half-baked "knowledge" that presently forms the impoverished "ideas bank" of UNCTAD.

Mr. President, as I said earlier, I find it necessary to say these things. It is my role to say these things, and I need apologise to none. In the NGO caucus meetings prior to the official meeting of UNCTAD, my organisation, the ISGN, was represented by at least a hundred people coming from various parts of the third world within our network. As soon as the official meeting started, they all left, and I was the only one left behind to continue participating in the UNCTAD official proceedings. Our members left because they have little faith in a body that is driven by what they call the "top dogs" who are largely insensitive to the concerns of the "under-dogs". I was left behind to carry this message to you, which I now do. We fully appreciate that UNCTAD cannot perform miracles. We also understand the reality of real politik. But the G77 members of UNCTAD and its Secretariat do not have to bend backwards to sacrifice truth to the dictates of power and privilege and to compromise their own intellectual and moral integrity.