MY ATTEMPT TO ENTER THE BOILER ROOM
Yash Tandon

It was late evening of the 13th November. Delegates from mostly countries of the South were sitting around in the outer lounge, rather aimlessly, waiting for news on the state of the dreaded text. We had heard about the "green room" where hard negotiations were taking place. I tried to look for my Minister, to ask if he had some news, but he was nowhere to be found. The delegations of small countries had no means of keeping in contact with each other. Bored, actually angered, at watching the CNN showing US bombs pounding Al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan, I decided to venture entry into the green room. I hadn't realised then that the room had turned into a veritable boiler room. I was to discover that only later.

I walked to the neck of the pass that separated the lounge from the narrow corridor that led to the "green rooms". A security person from the WTO, a national of a French-speaking West African nation, was guarding it. I tried to justify my reason for entry by presenting myself as delegate. I was only an NGO delegate, but I feigned full status, as my badge did not make the subtle distinction between different kinds of delegates. My ploy did not work, however. The security guard looked at some list he was carrying near his chest and denied my entry. Sony Ramphal from Guyana soon joined me. He too could not persuade the guard to let him in. Soon there were two gentlemen who joined us, one was a delegate from Canada and the other from Australia. The guard looked at their badges and let them in without question. The two walked in, with cursory, almost derisory, glance at these two coloured representatives of the world, Sony and I. I wondered what the guard's precise instructions were on who to let in and who not to.

(In Seattle, when faced with a similar situation, I had raised my voice in argument with the guard, and pounded the table asserting my right to enter the "green room" there. Very soon nearby pressmen anxious to know if there was a story about to emerge surrounded us with their cameras and notebooks. To get out of his predicament, the guard had hurriedly let me into the green room. This time, at Doha, the press were excluded from the vicinity, and so I knew the "make noise!" gambit won't work. I had to try another tack).

So I softened my voice and drew the guard's attention to the fact that the two gentlemen he had let in were mere "delegates" whereas Hon. Shridarth Ramphal was "Leader of Delegation" (I flaunted Ramphal's badge in the guard's face). He could keep me out, I pleaded, but he should let Hon. Ramphal in. "This gentleman has a higher status than the two you have let in," I argued. He looked confused and was momentarily destabilised. But he stood his ground. I decided not to push matters - the guard's job could be in jeopardy, and like me he was from Africa, and jobs are hard to get for Africans. Whilst I was still pondering on my next move, from inside the sanctum came Peter Pedersen, economic adviser to Mike Moore, and a national of Holland. He knew me from before, when he was the NGO liaison officer within the WTO. As soon as he saw me, he authorised the guard to allow the two of us (Sony and myself) in. On the very first day of the WTO meeting, I had complained to him that it was unfair that none of the "Friends of the Chair" came from an LDC country. He had assured me then that there was no problem getting access to the "friends"; all I had to do was to approach them. In letting us in this time, I decided, he was keeping to his word. I thanked him. A master stroke, nonetheless, I thought, the air of "transparency" must be nurtured as far as possible, and Peter was an expert practitioner. As Sony and I entered the corridor of the inner sanctum, Peter walked on ahead of us as if gliding on a light cloud.

I walked furtively, like a thief, full of guilt. I was nervous. But I was determined to test how far the pretence of transparency could be sustained. I brushed aside the sense of guilt that confused my mind temporarily, straightened myself from the semi-crouching position that guilt had unconsciously brought me to, lifted my head and shoulders, and I was soon on a cloud of my own.

It was a narrow corridor, with a dozen or so parallel rooms aligned on the left, each serviced by an outer small room with a secretariat. Sony Ramphal soon disappeared into one of these. I was still trying to puzzle out which room to enter. After peering into a few empty rooms, I saw Peter again walking in the corridor, and he led me to room 5. I opened the room, and there were a number of men and women there, all white. And so I decided that was not the room for me. I couldn't figure out why Peter directed me to that room. I was quickly out into the corridor again. There were a number of people sitting on the chairs in the corridor, and I asked an Indian person (I don't know whether he was delegate or a WTO staff) what was the most important room there, and he said room 12. So I headed in that direction. Before my entry I again encountered Peter, and he tried to divert me by saying that there was nobody in room 12, and may be I should go to room 10. I went to room 10 but there were people whom I could see were discussing nothing of insignificance. I waited for Peter to disappear from the corridor, and dashed for room 12, but Peter soon followed me.

I had, however, already reached room 12, had opened it and got in. I saw about 20-25 people, among them Hon. Iddi Simba, Minister of Trade and Industry from Tanzania, and Ambassador Ali Mchumo, Tanzania's ambassador to Geneva. Peter came right behind, and persuaded me to step out into the secretariat room. He said I had no right to be there. Not wishing to create a scene, I stepped out in the adjoining room. I told him I did have a right to go in because I had something to say to the meeting. I showed him a document that I had in my hand. I was equipped with a document presented by a number of small countries, including Uganda, that had officially conveyed to the WTO our position on the Singapore issues. I had a right to protect the interests of my country, I said. He said Uganda was not invited to the meeting. "Why not?" I asked. He said Uganda was represented by Minister Iddi Simba, and I said Hon. Simba had no mandate to represent Uganda; he was representing the LDC countries, only a Ugandan can negotiate for Uganda. From inside the room then came Andie Stoeller, the Deputy Director General of the WTO. I explained to him my case for entering the room, and showed him the document. Stoeller was smarter. He said I should give him the document, since in the end he was the one who was going to draft the relevant sections on the new issues anyway, and he will see to it that the document I had would be "taken care of". I refused. I said I could not negotiate with him (although I didn't tell him the reason for it, namely that he was "only" a civil servant), I could only negotiate with those inside the room. He suggested a compromise, offering to take my document to Minister Iddi Simba inside.

I was getting nowhere. I was flanked by two senior officers of the WTO. The only option I had was to make noise and be bodily thrown out. I did contemplate that option, but ruled it out as impractical and unwise. I was after all a dignified delegate of my country, not a street protester, at least not here. So I proposed a counter compromise. If I can't negotiate on the substance of the issue, I thought to myself, at least let me negotiate on the procedure. It was the best I could do. I suggested that they should call Ambassador Mchumo outside so I could talk with him. They agreed. When Mchumo came out, he was surprised to see me, but quickly understood why I was there. (Mchumo is an old hand at the WTO. He was Chairman of the General Council before the fateful Seattle Conference. He had boldly put in all the concerns of the South into the pre-Seattle Text, which had made it difficult for the North to ignore them. Just before Doha, the Chairman of the Council, Harbison, had decided not to repeat Mchumo's gambit. Instead, he presented a "clean" text, one without brackets, and one that left out the concerns of the developing countries from the draft, ab initio, so they could not even be considered). Mchumo, of course, knew the document I was carrying, since Tanzania was one of its signatories. I told him my only purpose to come there was to tell him to stand firm, and not to compromise. "Remember Zanzibar!" I told him. (Zanzibar was the country where, in July, the LDC countries had taken a common stand against having the new issues included in the agenda of the fourth Ministerial). He winked and smiled but said nothing. He was in a hurry to get back into the room (I had wondered then what was driving him back into the room - loyalty or masochism?) I could see that he was nervous and sweating despite the air conditioner. He took my document and disappeared into the room. And I retired into the corridor to sit in one of the chairs to consider my next strategy. Where do I go from here?

Soon Peter Pedersen passed by again, and asked me what I was "still" doing there. I told him I was not satisfied that I was not allowed to enter the room where hard negotiations were going on, and although Minister Simba was there to present the case of the LDC countries, nobody was there to protect the specific interests of Uganda. He repeated that Uganda was not invited, and I said the Chairman had no right to exclude Uganda. "Oh," he said, "So you think the Chairman has no right to invite whom he wants to!!" For a moment I was confused; it sounded as though I had trampled on some sacred law of the state of Qatar. I reflected a bit, and then replied, sounding as though I was the world's authority on WTO law, "No," I said," The Chairman does not have such rights." "That's very interesting," he looked genuinely surprised at my response. "Very interesting," he repeated, "We need to talk about that." (I hope he keeps this promise). And he floated away on his cloud.

When I came out of the heat of the boiler room, I found, by mere chance, that Ambassador Boniface Chidyausiku and Tadeous Chifamba of the Zimbabwe delegation were in the lounge in argument with Dr. Chiedu Osakwe, the Nigerian senior official at the WTO. They were trying to persuade Chiedu to let Chifamba go into the negotiating room because their Minister was there, all alone. Chiedu was not sure he could do that. "But do you agree that the Minister has a right to have at least one senior official with him, that he cannot be there alone?" Chifamba persisted. Chiedu agreed, felt most uncomfortable, and excused himself, saying he will do the best he can to help. (Later I checked with Chifamba if he was allowed into the room. He said, no, he wasn't.)

The next day, before we got to see the final draft of the text, I briefly reported my experience to my Minister, Hon. Edward Rugumayo, the minister for Tourism, Trade and Industry. I told him that I took full responsibility for the initiative I had taken. I was afraid that he might have to answer for me. I told him that I had tried to look for him the previous day, but in the confusion there, it was impossible to establish contact with him. He looked at me benignly, and said what I did was "naughty" (this is, for those who do not know, a very colonial word, at least in the African setting; it is a patronising reprimand for going against the authority of the teacher, or "the madam", or the rulers), and then he added, more philosophically, that it was wrong for small countries to be made to feel guilty when they shouldn't be. "It's not right," he said. I felt hugely relieved.

When the outcome of the night of 13th emerged the next day, I knew in which furnace it was forged. I had felt the heat. Ì

THEY ALSO MAKE BOMBS OUT OF PAPER
Raj Patel*

A fertilizer bomb that kills hundreds in Oklahoma. Fuel-laden civil jets that kill 4000 in New York. A sanctions policy that kills one and a half million in Iraq. A trade policy that immiserates continents. You can make a bomb out of anything. The ones on paper hurt the most.

Tucked away in the news in mid-November was a snippet from the Middle East directly related to the 'War on Terrorism', but one that didn't get quite as much coverage as it ought to have done. The World Trade Organization held its Fourth Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar, and came away with a Ministerial Declaration fluttering in its hand. United States Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, peddled the Ministerial Conference as part of the war effort. Here's what he said: "America's ability to sustain coalitions against terrorism will depend in part on our attention to the problems faced by our partners. Many democratic governments in developing nations, already struggling with economic challenges before September 11, now face staggering difficulties."

That these difficulties are due to the previous trade rounds, and to developing countries' increased, policed and enforced integration into America's global economy, seems temporarily to have escaped Mr Zoellick. As ever, beneath the veneer of US magnanimity writhes a tangle of less noble intentions. The new Doha Development Agenda has much in common with its noisier cousin, The War on Terrorism. It is warfare by other means against the poor, at home and abroad.

Indeed, the weapons of war seem to have informed the negotiating strategy of the WTO's handlers. One of the most dazzling early innovations from the arms industry was to pack a brace of warheads, including some dummies, atop intercontinental ballistic missiles. When these warheads re-enter the atmosphere, the enemy's defences are spread so thin trying to pick off each individual bomb that at least one would be sure to get through. And one warhead is quite enough.

So it is with the development agenda. As Barry Coates, Director of the World Development Movement notes, "Developing countries have neither the capacity nor the wish to negotiate these new agreements." The civil services in the poorest countries have been pared to the bone by World Bank structural adjustment policies. Many cannot afford to have even one delegate in Geneva to monitor, negotiate and resist these organisations. Negotiating several issues at once is well beyond the means of most poor countries. The mere demand that these wrecked diplomacies 'negotiate' a cluster of new issues effectively guarantees their detonation.

Why, then, did developing countries agree to sign? Part of the reason lies in the magic of advertising. The new round hasn't been called a 'round'. Instead what we have is a new brand round, the "Doha Development Agenda". This rebranding idea is one with which we are all familiar - you tinker with the name, but nothing else, in order to make punters believe that you've actually improved things. It has worked for corporate giants, it works for the US government. The rebranded School of the Assassins in Fort Benning Georgia is now catchily known as WHISC, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, but it still trains Latin American officers in techniques of interrogation to be tried out on uncooperative citizens back home. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Flushed with the success of this little public relations coup, the US government and its corporate sponsors transformed the new WTO round into a Development Agenda. True to the spirit of the exercise, it still looks and smells the same as past efforts. And it comes with no added developing country concerns either.

If you were following the flurry of trade debate emails, your spirits might have been raised a little with the announcement that developing countries won a major concession from rich countries. The Doha declaration on TRIPS - Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights - says that public health concerns can trump patents on drugs. A variety of non-governmental organizations in Doha rejoiced. It seemed as if the WTO had effectively condoned the exporting of cheap medicines to developing countries most in need of them. This seemed to be an important concession, an article of good faith on the part of the rich concerned with the 'difficulties' of their poorer brethren.

A more sober reading of the text of the declaration soon recorked the Champagne™. It turns out that the declaration merely clarifies existing provisions in the WTO patents regime, in which public health criteria can already be used to abrogate patent rights. There's nothing new in the Doha declaration to worry the pharmaceutical companies, as PhRMA, the US Pharmaceutical corporate lobby, have recently confirmed. In fact, the WTO's rules are so powerful that even rich countries are wary of them. Nothing else explains the Canadian government's swift about-face on the compulsory licencing of Cipro. If the Canadians are afraid compulsorily to licence because of the precedent this will set for the pharmaceutical industry, it's unlikely that small developing countries stand much of a chance. Only Brazil has moved ahead with a compulsory licensing initiative, despite US threats of legal action. To have the rich countries affirm what was written into an already unjust law is scant victory.

Christmas has come early for the sick in poor countries. And, yep, they got a kick in the teeth. Again.

None of this answers the question of why developing countries agreed to sign the declaration. Developing countries aren't so easily beguiled. After all, they knew that the WTO allowed for compulsory licencing in the public interest. What's going on?

Well, one reason for the signing isn't big news: since so little was given away, there was plenty of room to be able to spin the results to everyone's benefit. At a time when the big players in international politics are looking for dividends, no matter how empty, this was a fine chance to 'reinject confidence' into the international system. The Indian government were able to trumpet their international belligerence to a domestic audience in need of feel-good news. Meanwhile the EU and US were able to brush aside demands on agricultural subsidy reduction, re-evaluating TRIPs and implementation issues. The rich still haven't delivered on many of the promises they made in 1994.

Another compelling argument for the signing of the declaration is the liberal application of carrots and sticks to the delegates. In order to maintain their coalition against terrorism, the US and its allies have brought their external considerations of aid budgets, trade opportunities and debt forgiveness to bear with unusual vigour. Which developing country, choking on immense and illegitimate debt, wouldn't like to be a Pakistan right now, on the receiving end of international largesse, World Bank and IMF debt cancellation, and CNN's compassion?

Which developing country, not necessarily among the 70 listed by Mr Rumsfeld, would like to be Afghanistan? Yash Tandon, a seasoned activist from the SEATINI group in Harare, put it like this: "In Seattle, they had green rooms. In Doha they had boiler rooms. The rich countries lined up the poor, and took them in one by one, twisting their arms and extracting concessions with the threats of reduced aid budgets or worse."

The pressure on developing countries, the strong 'No to a new round' positions taken by developing countries, and the pressure on the North to come out with some sort of agreements made possible a number of feats of diplomatic prestidigitation. Consider this example: the EU and its former colonies in the Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) are party to the Cotonou agreement. Cotonou grants a series of preferential trade privileges to exporters in these countries. These privileges, as the recent dispute over bananas shows, are questionably compatible with the WTO's most-favoured nation stipulations. The ACP countries had been pushing hard for a waiver, so that these meager preferences would be accepted by the WTO. As if by magic, the WTO agreed.

The real reasons are a little less impressive. It would have been exceptionally awkward to refuse this relatively small concession in a 'development round'; the ACP have until 2008 to become WTO compliant in any case; there had been a great deal of campaigning and lobbying around this issue before Doha; and that the EU was looking to appear magnanimous. Magic looks better, though. The waiver has been spun as a concert of Northern and Southern interests.

The Indian government, the most initially intransigent and powerful developing country, demanded a caveat before signing the Doha declaration. They wanted clarification from the Chair of the Conference, Youssef Kemal, on whether signing the agreement actually committed *everyone* to a new round, or merely to talks about talks. Here's Mr Kemal's reply.

"Let me say that with the respect to the reference to an 'explicit consensus' being needed, in these paragraphs, for a decision to be taken at the Fifth Session of the Ministerial Conference, my understanding is that, at that Session, a decision would indeed need to be taken, by explicit consensus, before negotiations on Trade and Investment and Trade and Competition Policy, Transparency in Government Procurement, and Trade Facilitation could proceed. In my view, this would give each Member the right to take a position on modalities that would prevent negotiations from proceeding after the Fifth Session of the Ministerial Conference until that Member is prepared to join in an explicit consensus."

Poor Mr Kemal. Beyond being forced to talk in this unutterable doublespeak, he's clearly someone under duress. Things that you say with a gun to your head often don't count against you under more normal circumstances. And since the Indian government was asking for this clarification minutes before the end of the conference, and given that Youssef Kemal had spent a great deal of time working to make sure that the conference resulted in some sort of declaration, it's not terribly surprising that he agreed to whatever they said. The subtext here is quite simple: "Yeah, whatever, for the love of god just sign the damn thing". Can we expect a process of explicit consensus next time round? It is, at best, unlikely. The WTO has a track record of promises broken to the South. From implementation protocols ignored, to preliminary 'studies' before negotiations waived, it is standard diplomatic practice to throw crumbs to developing countries at one negotiation, and then pick them off the table with a damp middle finger at the next.

Perhaps the best explanation as to why developing countries went ahead with the round, though, is that the mystery rests on a misconception. In Seattle, Southern governments refused to sign a declaration not because they opposed the entrenchment of neoliberalism and the elite class bias that comes with it, but because they had been roughly treated. Delegates had not been able to enter meetings, and the US negotiating team had rubbed Southern inferiority in their faces. In other words, the signing of the Doha Development Agenda is only a mystery if one thinks that developing country governments have recently taken a principled stand against neoliberalism. They haven't. The refusal to sign at Seattle was not about indignation at neoliberalism, but about the failure to treat elites as they are accustomed.

In Doha, by contrast, Mr Zoellick was a dealer, a broker of accord, a merchant of consensus. This new-found humility evidently pushed the buttons of the developing country elite. So they signed. This should come as no surprise. These are the elites that milk and pimp the majority of people in their countries. It's hard to see why putting them in five star accommodation and making them feel important might make them less venal.

Let us be clear. The Doha declaration and the war on terrorism are one and the same process of power politicking. And woe betide those who raise their voices in protest. Violence and silence are partners. Indeed, the 'war on terrorism' and the 'war on poverty' even have similar processes of suppression of dissent. It has, for example, been little reported that the WTO tried to muffle an alternative website. The operators of Gatt.org were told by their internet service provider, after pressure was applied from the WTO, that they had to take the site down because of copyright violations. Using a slightly outdated facsimile of the WTO's own website, the site provides links to alternative sources of information on the WTO, as well as a modest character assassination of trade-unionist turned Director General of the WTO, Mike Moore. Clearly, someone at the WTO doesn't have a sense of humour. And wants alternatives silenced.

Fact is, trade has as little to do with development now as it did when the British South Africa Company, and the Dutch and British East India companies smothered Africa and Asia. The WTO continues to reach beyond any reasonable economic arguments about trade with its 'Trade Related' intellectual property, labour, and transparency rulings. That's okay. We're used to it. The war on terrorism has, as John Pilger has noted, nothing to do with terrorists.

Both the international trade system and the war on terrorism are technologies of entrenchment. We are sold war as patriotism. We are sold trade as efficiency. Efficiency is the Trojan horse of fascist politics. On the surface, the idea seems inviting enough - get more for your money than you currently get. This is the magic of international trade liberalisation, after all. Let consumers reap the benefits of cheap production in other places, stop subsidising your own wasteful production. You can even give the money you save from subsidies to widows and orphans.

Not that the winners from 'efficiency' seem to care about widows, or indeed any women at all. Perhaps the greatest crime in the drive to efficiency, as with the drive to 'international security' is the silence over the suffering of women. In the production of tea, coffee, cocoa, textiles, services and agricultural innovation, the most exploited are people of colour, and above all women.

That's not entirely fair. Free traders do have a thing or two to say about women. The stylised argument is this:

"Look! These peasant women, who previously didn't have an income are now able to earn cash, if only in the informal economy! Not only does trade continue to liberate, but it always has. Some women have benefited from trade for centuries. Cross border trade in the horn of Africa, for instance, puts women in a position of slightly more power than their counterparts elsewhere in Africa."

But there's a sleight of hand, a twist of a dagger in this. Rural communities involved in the export industry are on a guaranteed losing streak. The price of the goods they sell has fallen over the past thirty years - indeed, the market guarantees that when demand is high, supply will rise to lower price in the long term. And to supply, all you need is to be in debt, have a tropical climate, and cheap labour. Any takers?

In other words, the prices of these things, the very things that are meant to lift the poor out of poverty, plummeted. Disenfranchised, the rural poor migrated to the city. And since there really isn't a way to grow much food there, working for cash for food became a necessity. And with some fine modelling, the informal economy has been illuminated for us. And women are now cash-rich. Development? Exactly.

Efficiency is not a democratic value. (It's hardly accidental that an 'efficient' is a nineteenth century term for a soldier ready for combat.) Efficiency is a technology of conservatism. It is a way of asking how to wring more out of the status quo. If the status quo were just, efficiency would be a luxury we could afford to think about. But it isn't. Efficiency is an entrenchment. This is the sort of entrenchment that has been peddled under the lobotomising slogan "If we don't do X, the terrorists have already won" where X is exactly the same as we did before. This is the sort of conservatism that does a disservice to Conservatism. It is reactionary, mindless and stupefying. We must remain the same not because change must happen slowly, but because any change lets terrorists win.

The war on terrorism isn't really about preventing the savage acts that kill thousands every day. Trade isn't really about development. They're both ways of entrenching power, making the world safe for capital, in our names, written into the laws of our countries.

The connection with law - and the majority of the WTO's employees are lawyers - is important. 'Trade as development' and 'War as peace' snap the connection between law and justice. The laws invoked to sanctify these power politics are vastly unjust, and an example of the kind of justice that people of colour experienced for a while. Apartheid, after all, had its legal justifications. It was written on peoples' bodies just as it was written in statute. The law is a weapon of the strong far more than a weapon of the weak.

Sometimes, though, paper can become inconvenient for even the most powerful. The rule of law can turn into the rile of law for the rich as much as for the poor. The solution? Ignore it. This is what the US has done to its own constitution and trade commitments over the past decade. The constitution has finally made the transition from parchment to toilet paper. John Ashcroft's ransacking of attorney-client privilege, allowing him to monitor attorney-client interactions without telling anyone, violates both the Fourth and Sixth amendments.

Let no-one say that all it takes to kill one of these outrages is 'open democratic debate'. There is no such thing. The self professed home of democracy is run on the dollar-a-vote principle. Such politics rests on our consent, though. When we withhold it, we reclaim the power that is justly ours. It's important to remember that the battle against the corporatisation of medicine was won not in Doha, but through large-scale international mobilization, education and protest. The declaration on public health was a forgone conclusion only after a great deal of hard work by groups like the Treatment Action Campaign and ActUp! Philadelphia, Paris and New York. The victory is well worth the struggle, but is far from over. After all, the horror of 'international trade as development' still remains. We should not forget that we've only won what was taken away from us by the WTO in the first instance. And when we roll back the police state in the US and elsewhere, we'll only be reclaiming the liberty that was snatched from us.

It is time for a healthy dose of pessimism of the intellect. There are tough times ahead. In many places around the world, an article like this could constitute criminal incitement. You can make a bomb out of paper. As the Gandhians among us know, you can also make a weapon out of truth. To update Orwell, telling the truth is now a terrorist act. So if we don't become guerrillas armed with truth, satyagrahi? Well, then the real terrorists have already won. Ì

*Raj Patel is a co-editor of The Voice of the Turtle. http://voiceoftheturtle.org

DIRECTOR'S COMMENT: AFRICA MUST BUILD NEGOTIATING CAPACITY AND COHERENCE BETWEEN GENEVA AND BRUSSELS

In the early hours of the 13th November, 2001, the waiver issue of the Cotonou ACP-EU Agreement seemed to hold the future of the success or otherwise of the Fourth Ministerial Meeting of the WTO at Doha. In the event, the deal was struck. The waiver was granted. The ACP countries, most of them African, were provided a good reason, now, to accept the Doha Ministerial text. Until then many of them had serious reservations about the Doha text. With the waiver granted, the trade negotiators could now go home and tell their publics, especially the private sector, that they managed to get the waiver into their bags at Doha. Their preferential access to European markets (at least until 2008) would not be a reason for them to be taken to the WTO's disputes settlement panels for infringing WTO rules. The rules had been waived.

Doha exposed African countries lack of proper negotiating structures
Whether the waiver issue was such a major gain for the African ACP countries, especially when they had to pay the price of agreeing to otherwise onerous obligations put on them by other parts of the Doha Declaration, is at least a debateable matter. But one thing is for sure: African countries, though much better prepared at Doha than at any other previous WTO Ministerial meetings, had no firmly established structure to iron out their negotiating positions in various fora.

There are so many of these fora - besides the WTO and the ACP-EU Agreement, there is the US African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA), there are regional negotiations going on in such bodies as the SADC, the COMESA, the ECOWAS, and the East African Cooperation, and, of course, there are several bi-lateral trade protocols to negotiate. It would require a juggler's dexterity to keep so many negotiating balls in the air. In the event, Africa managed to maintain an unprecedented solidarity at Doha, until, that is the last day. That is when their hastily cobbled alliance between the African Union countries, the ACP countries and the LDCs, fell apart, and they got subjected to intense pressure by the big players (especially the European Union) to yield to their diktat.

Geneva and Brussels: the two centres where Africa's trading future is decided
One, among other, lessons of Doha is that Africa needs to put in place proper negotiating structures and procedures. How should they negotiate in one forum without losing out in another? How can they prevent their demands in one forum becoming an Achilles heel in another forum, as indeed the waiver issue (from the ACP-EU negotiating forum) became at the WTO Ministerial at Doha?

In all the talk (much of it mostly goodwill gestures) about "capacity building" for Africa, this is the one aspect of it that is least catered for by the "donor" community, or by institutions such as the WTO, the UNCTAD and the International Trade Centre in Geneva. How does Africa build its trade negotiating capacity in different fora, sorting out incompatibilities and contradictions between these whilst, at the same time, also maintaining their continental solidarity? An impossible task? Nearly so, but there is no escape from trying to face up to the challenge. It has to be done.

In two years' time, Africa will face yet another WTO Ministerial meeting, probably towards the middle or end of the year 2003. Well before that meeting, however, there are going to be on-going negotiations, or at least identifying issues for negotiations, on the Doha agenda. These will take place mostly in Geneva. Besides the on-going negotiations on the built-in issues (mainly agriculture and services), there are the various working groups on the four Singapore issues (Competition policy, Investment Policy, Government Procurement, and Trade Facilitation), there is the Committee on Trade and Environment, and there are still pending a host of "implementation" issues. African countries need to prepare their capacity to effectively participate in these negotiations.

Whilst these negotiations are proceeding in Geneva, there are also going on simultaneously, at Brussels, the preparations for the ACP-EU negotiations on Economic Partnership Agreements - EPAs. And before these negotiations are effectively launched, the ACP countries have to agree among themselves on their own action plan. In June 2002, the ACP Trade Ministers will adopt the draft negotiating mandate to be considered and adopted by the ACP Summit of Heads of State. The Cotonou Agreement sets general parameters for negotiations but does not specify how these are to be conducted. Before the ACP trade negotiators concert their negotiating strategies they need to consider at least the following issues:
· A clarification of the underlying objectives of the negotiations;
· The geographical and other configurations of the EPAs;
· The impact of the introduction of free trade with EU on fiscal revenues of ACP states;
· How the rights of LDCs to non-reciprocal trade preferences are protected;
· How the Everything But Arms (EBA) regime offered to LDCS may be extended to all ACP countries;
· The supply-side constraints in ACP countries; and
· The adverse effects of reformed CAP on development of ACP agriculture and value added agro-processing sectors.

This is a very tall order. African trade negotiators based in Brussels will be caught up with their own agenda, and those based in Geneva with theirs. There is so much they can cope with. There is a definite and urgent need to examine the effects of one set of negotiations in one venue with the other set of negotiations in another venue. Unfortunately, as of now, there is very little, if any, correspondence between the negotiators in Geneva and those in Brussels. This is not for lack of will as for lack of capacity and time. Africa simply does not have enough human resources to spread between the two centres. This lack of correspondence and capacity came glaringly to light at Doha.

The two cultures
Also, the negotiating culture at Geneva is very different from that in Brussels. The WTO is a hard institution; the negotiators know that behind every agreement lies the power of sanctions. Furthermore, at the end of the day, each nation is for itself; alliances are fragile and temporary, often depending on the actual personalities that are present in Geneva from the different African countries, and thus subject to change from year to year, even from month to month.

The ACP-EU relations that are worked out in Brussels, on the other hand, are a slow evolving historical phenomenon in an enlarging and integrating European Union on the one hand and a disparate assembly of states from Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific island countries trying hard to forge some kind of a united position on various issues of negotiations between them and the European Commission.

However, Brussels is beginning to become as "hard" a place as Geneva. The Lome Convention was based on the principle of non-reciprocity. Now the WTO ethos is fast permeating the Brussels negotiating culture. Cotonou is based on the WTO principle of reciprocity and all non-reciprocal arrangements will cease to exist by the year 2008. Also, the language of Cotonou is the hard, brittle language of sanctions, not unlike that of the WTO. No longer does one talk about "aid entitlements" as under Lome, whereby African countries used to get five-year aid allocations regardless of performance. Under Cotonou, it is the language of "performance", fulfilment of agreed obligations, and, yes, sanctions. And these sanctions might be imposed not only for failure to perform on the economic front, but also in matters such as governance and domestic policies of ACP states. Thus, for example, Zimbabwe is currently at the receiving end of EU sanctions on its alleged failure to maintain rule of law on the question of land reform.

Learn from Doha
All this points to the urgency of building structures that talk to one another, that periodically cohere policies, and that maintain close links with the capitals so that contradictions and differences are resolved well before African negotiators face Doha-like situations where last minute concessions are made in the absence of prior strategic calculations based on knowledge and information.

African countries, with their non-African allies among the other ACP countries (the Caribbean and Pacific island countries), and non-African allies among the LDCs (such as Bangladesh and Haiti) need to work together. The AU-ACP-LDC alliance that came into existence almost spontaneously at Doha was no accident of history. It was bound to happen. In all the groupings Africa forms the majority. They are also the most affected by the regimes of the WTO, Cotonou and other multilateral and bilateral trading systems. And, of course, they have more or less the same interests to protect and to advance in all these fora of trade negotiations. There is need therefore to address this issue of coherence in a systematic, structured manner, rather than, as happened at Doha, in an ad hoc, unplanned way.

What is to be done?
1. Set up mechanisms for regular consultations between Geneva and Brussels. The structures are, more or less, already in place, in both places. What needs to be done is to provide some regularity of consultation between them so that the implications of what is happening in Brussels are understood in Geneva, and vice versa.

2. Set up mechanisms for regular consultations between Geneva, Brussels and the capitals. If Geneva and Brussels based negotiators often do not know what is happening in the other centre, the capitals often do not know what is happening in either of them. There are so many line-ministries involved in these very complex negotiations that the capitals are often even more confused than Geneva or Brussels. This opens the door to being manipulated by the big powers when critical issues are at stake, as happened at Doha.

3. Ask for technical assistance from those responsible for having loaded such a heavy burden of negotiations on African countries. These include the WTO itself and the EC, but also the big trading countries - the USA, the EU, Canada and Japan. To be sure, the promises of technical assistance were used to persuade African countries to accept the onerous burdens of Doha. But now that Doha is a reality, Africans must ask for those promises to be fulfilled. Technical assistance must be demand driven, and so African countries must come up with their own list of demands on how the assistance should be provided.

4. The institutions of the AU, the ACP and the LDCs must set up consultation and cohering mechanisms between their various structures. This must be done consciously, if necessary, at the highest level of the Heads of State.

Finally, members of the AU, the ACP and the LDC must demand more time. The deadlines for both the Cotonou and the WTO negotiations are too tight. Already there is, in the case of Cotonou, an "implementation sleepage", not least on account of the slow bureaucracy of the European Commission in providing the necessary financial support to enable consultations among the ACP countries. In the case of the WTO, although the big powers and the WTO may try to rush African countries into negotiations by the deadlines set by them, Africans must resist this rush. They must be ready to negotiate before they negotiate.

Produced by the International South Group Network (ISGN) Director and Editor: Y. Tandon; Advisor on SEATINI: B. L. Das
Editorial Assistance: Helene Bank, Rosalina Muroyi and Raj Patel
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