UNCTAD'S POST--DOHA PLAN OF TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE AND CAPACITY BUILDING
Chandrakant Patel*

Summary and Recommendations

UNCTAD's $17.5 million post-Doha plan of technical assistance allocates almost 50.0 percent ($8.2 million) to a single issue, investment. This share rises to 60 percent if the other Singapore issues --competition policy and trade facilitation-are added to the investment budget. Such an allocation raises the question whether developing countries priorities and areas for support (such as agriculture, implementation issues, market access, services, industrial tariffs, TRIPS and WTO rules) have been given adequate weight in the UNCTAD 'plan.' In order to ensure that the 'plan' is recipient- driven, the African and the LDCs groups should help re-order the priorities in the 'plan'. In particular, they may propose (1) that between 60-70 percent of the resources of the Trust Fund be earmarked for them;(2) by far the largest share of support be targeted for dealing with implementation issues and on-going and mandated negotiations deriving from WTO agreements. To ensure that the 'plan' meets their priorities, a joint working body of beneficiaries and donors should monitor and evaluate the allocations over the plan period.

In response to the commitments in the Doha Ministerial Declaration for increased technical assistance and capacity building, international agencies in particular WTO and UNCTAD, have put forward ambitious programmes of support for developing countries and economies in transition. In December, WTO's General Council established a Doha Development Agenda Global Trust Fund with a core budget targeted at 15 million Swiss Francs per annum. This represents an addition of little more than SF 2.0 million over comparable spending in the previous year.
UNCTAD has unveiled its own programme of post-Doha technical assistance, also to be channeled through a Trust Fund. (UNCTAD/RMS/TCS/1 dated 5 February 2002). At the recently concluded meeting of UNCTAD's Commission on Trade in Goods and Services and Commodities, the Secretary General of UNCTAD stated that " Consultations had been held with the potential beneficiaries of UNCTAD's assistance, and priority topics had been selected to help developing countries to face the new challenges." He then went on to state that the ' plan' of technical activities had five main elements:
§ It was designed on the basis of requests put forward by developing countries;
§ It took into account the need to articulate regional and multilateral trade negotiations;
§ It was adapted to the specificity of the beneficiaries in order to fit local needs and priorities;
§ It responded to both short term and long term needs of the developing countries;
§ The assistance had to be delivered in cooperation with other agencies, the 'WTO being the first partner';
The following paragraphs analyze the UNCTAD 'plan'. In light of the pronouncements of its Secretary General on the subject, this note makes suggestions to ensure that the 'plan' does indeed reflect the priorities of its putative beneficiaries and is indeed driven by them.

The UNCTAD 'Plan':

The document cited above does not, rather curiously, give any indication of the total cost of the so-called 'plan'. This information has to be derived from proposed expenditures and allocations implied in the three sections of the document. The total equals approximately US $ 17.430 million, to be disbursed over 24 months starting the first quarter of 2002.Of the total, a 'minimum' of $ 7 .0 million has been budgeted for seven trade-related "windows" or work areas; (these are: agriculture, services and implementation issues; environment; competition policy; working groups on trade, debt and finance and transfer of technology; and LDCs;) $ 8.2 million for investment and $ 2.2 million for trade facilitation and electronic commerce. If support costs averaging 13 percent are added to the total, one arrives at a total of approximately $ 19.7 million. Aside from the question whether the sums envisaged are likely to materialize, the question also arises whether UNCTAD secretariat itself has the capacity to effectively deliver such a programme, given its on-going activities and commitments. It is known that it's current budget for technical cooperation is now of the order of $25 million per annum. Is the budget now proposed additional to this amount? Are some of the programmed items parts of on-going activities? It would be reasonable to assume that the proposed budget is additional to on-going activities and for which a Trust Fund is being established. These questions are important for several reasons. In the first place, a sizeable expansion in UNCTAD's technical co-operation activities will further distort the balance between its regular mandated activities (established by the General Assembly) and those deriving from technical co-operation programme (usually established by the donors and the secretariat). This would significantly change the character and orientation of the institution, a process some believe may have already started as technical cooperation activities are beginning to assume the center-stage in UNCTAD.One consequence of this shift has been to grant donors and their appointees a major say in the management of the institution. The large proposed allocation for Doha-related work may also have implications for UNCTAD's other activities such as its support for work relating to debt and for the work of the Group of 24. It is therefore important for member states, particularly developing countries, to scrutinize the implications of these shifts if they wish ensure that UNCTAD does not deviate further from its mandated advocacy of the cause of development. More immediately, however, they will need to assume greater responsibility in priority setting for UNCTAD's post-Doha activities.
The 'plan' itself comprises three distinct and seemingly unrelated items: trade, investment and trade facilitation and electronic commerce. Each of the three components or sub-programmes proposes its own internal work priorities, its own separate budget with apparently varying methods of calculating it. For example, the investment, trade facilitation and electronic commerce components exclude support costs (about 13 percent or an additional $1.35 million) whilst the trade component does not specify whether its budget includes or excludes support costs. Likewise, whilst some of the areas (investment and trade facilitation) include project personnel costs, official travel and mission costs, in-service training costs, equipment, reporting and miscellaneous costs, and overheads, in the cases of others it is not specified whether the budget includes/excludes such items. Then again, budgets for investment, trade facilitation and electronic commerce provide yearly breakdown of proposed spending, but no comparable breakdown is proposed for the trade component. Finally, whilst the proposed budgets for investment, trade facilitation and electronic commerce follow standard ways of presenting such proposals, the trade component proposes seven windows-or work areas. These cover an identical set of activities and budget for each window, irrespective of the relative importance of the issues covered. To illustrate this point, the budget for activities relating to the working groups on debt, on technology and on competition policy allocates the same level of resources ($590,000) as for negotiations on issues such as agriculture, services, implementation and environment and market access.

If the sum of the parts of the 'plan' does not add to the whole, this reflects the fact that the proposals are an agglomeration of the disparate agendas of UNCTAD's internal administrative units on trade, investment and trade facilitation. Consequently, the plan is neither internally consistent nor coherent nor indeed even a 'plan'. This, however, has not has not prevented its authors from proposing priorities, within each of the three sub-programs as well as for the 'plan' taken as a whole.

Perhaps the most serious shortcoming of the document is that it aggregates areas where developing countries have binding obligations deriving from existing WTO agreements with new issues for which they have no comparable obligations. The only commitment they have with respect to the new issues is to engage in a study process and take decisions on their inclusion or exclusion for negotiations at a future date i.e. 2003. In treating relatively central issues-such as services, agriculture, trade and environment, implementation, and market access, at par with the Singapore issues, UNCTAD suggests equivalence of importance among issues when this patently is not the case.

An examination of the seven " windows" or work areas proposed under the trade section -suggests that they are designed to be all things to all donors. To quote the document on this point, "Project budget is designed in a flexible manner to allow donors to finance one type of activity for several windows, one activity for all windows or all activities for one window." In giving donors such latitude in picking and choosing areas they wish to fund, UNCTAD's management has effectively ceded decisions on priority- setting to the donors. Under the a la carte approach advocated by UNCTAD, donors will undoubtedly support programs that cater to their own political priorities and objectives. It may perhaps be naïve to think otherwise and assume that donors are altruistic in providing resources for strengthening the capacities of their adversaries in trade and related economic negotiations. On their part, as consumers of technical assistance, developing countries need to be watchful and adhere to the caveat emptor principle.
In the trade section, each of the seven "windows" outlines, explicitly or implicitly, secretariats own preferences and priorities. For instance, the narrative under window 6 (working groups on trade, debt and finance and transfer of technology) makes references to "international diplomacy in science and technology" while completely ignoring arguably the more important issues covered in the working group on debt. Despite the existence of considerable in-house capacity to deal with this question, the main activity envisaged in this area is one of providing " inputs for the terms of reference of the WTO working groups." In the area of trade and technology, on the other hand, the text sets ambitious goals: "The establishment of an initiative on science and technology diplomacy to provide training and workshops for diplomats and policy-makers with a view to assisting them in international negotiations…" It is, presumably, not relevant for the drafters of this section that Doha terms of reference merely ask for an examination of "steps that might be taken within the mandate of the WTO to increase the flows of technology to developing countries." Given the fact that there does not exist any technical capacity to deal with this issue in-house, the initiative appears to be no more than an expression secretariat's internal agenda. Ironically, at precisely the time when the need for support in this area was growing, UNCTAD's management truncated the work programme on technology.
The final window in the trade section has been dedicated to the "LDC priority activities to be implemented in addition to those listed above under the six windows ". Against the background of the transfer of a significant quantum of resources from the extant LDCs programme to a newly created secretariat entity in New York, is it possible to be confident that UNCTAD's management has the commitment to support LDCs? Concern about the level and credibility of its support to the LDCs makes it imperative that the 'plan' earmarks from the very start a substantial share of the proposed Trust Fund resources for LDCs and Africa.

Finally, the work program put forward under the trade section ignores a number of important areas on the multilateral trade agenda. For example, the document does not mention the work that UNCTAD has been engaged in the area of dispute settlement. Although Doha has decided on " negotiations on improvements and clarifications of the Dispute Settlement understanding"
the consultations UNCTAD claims to have carried out appear to have failed to elicit any request for support in this area.

On what basis were the priorities in the program established? The Secretary General of UNCTAD has stated that they were arrived at on the basis of consultations with beneficiaries. In view of the widely expressed concerns of developing countries regarding the inclusion of new issues in the WTO's work programme, UNCTAD's claim must be questioned. It would be surely odd for a 'plan' to allocate almost 50 percent of its total budget to one issue-investment- that has been widely opposed by developing countries, especially in Africa. If account is taken of the proposed allocations for working groups on competition policy and trade facilitation, the total allocation for Singapore issues amounts to $ 10.6 million or 60 percent of the total.

The skewed allocation of resources to the Singapore issues conveys the impression that WTO members are committed to negotiations on these issues and consequently they warrant proportionately greater support by UNCTAD and others. As is known, their inclusion on the WTO agenda is far from agreed. The fact that the drivers in this area are developed countries and international agencies perhaps helps explain the hubris of the plan. It is expected that they will provide the necessary wherewithal to obliging agencies to help promote an agenda that has been opposed by a large number of developing countries and an overwhelming body of development NGOs from the South as wells the North.

UNCTAD Secretary General has also claimed that the 'plan' caters to local needs and priorities and accordingly has been tailored to their 'specificities'. This assumes that UNCTAD secretariat had undertaken or will undertake an assessment of individual country needs, at the national level. Such a task is daunting even for the most generously endowed of agencies. Setting aside for the moment the veracity of the assertion is it really possible to organize a bespoke technical cooperation programme, given resource limitations, to simultaneously address needs of countries that may have competing, even conflicting interests. How can, for example, a programme of support be organized to address, simultaneously, the varying concerns of food- importing and food- exporting countries? Or, for that matter, in support countries that welcome the inclusion of investment or competition policy under the WTO disciplines and those who oppose it.

The Secretary general of UNCTAD has also stated that UNCTAD's technical co-operation plan " has not been conceived in isolation." and that "our first partner will continue to be WTO." In conceding the primus inter pares status to the WTO, UNCTAD now has also conceded agenda and priority -setting on trade issues and technical assistance to WTO.It is consequently naïve, if not misleading, for UNCTAD to continue to argue that its mandate on trade and development can somehow be safeguarded and insulated from its growing activities in support of WTO. This has serious implications for the nature and quality of support that developing countries can expect from UNCTAD over the critical period ahead.

It is also time to lay to rest the canard of inter-agency cooperation and show it for what it is--- a way for the powerful and preferred institutions such as the World Bank and the WTO to ensure that lesser agencies faithfully follow their agenda and policy advice in the name of inter-agency co-operation and coherence. Experiences with programmes of inter-agency cooperation such as the now largely moribund integrated programme for LDCs and JITAP confirm that they in practice do little more than promote Washington-led orthodoxy on trade and development issues.

The op-ed character of some of the explanations in support of the ' plan' by its authors suggests that the plan is far from completion and consequently provides developing countries with an opportunity to suggest improvements, address imbalances, establish priorities and better monitor the expenditures.

Conclusions and Recommendations

In light of the above analysis, the LDCs and the African Groups in Geneva may wish to consider the following:
1. Seek to re-order the priorities established in the UNCTAD plan by proposing a significantly larger share of support for issues relating to existing WTO obligations and mandated negotiations in areas such as, for example, agriculture and services. Accordingly, a revised allocation should target approximately 80 -90 percent of the total resources towards on-going and mandated negotiations deriving from existing WTO agreements.
2. Allocations for the Singapore working/study groups and for the newly established ones on debt and finance and on trade and technology should be carefully reviewed and re-prioritized. Approximately the same amounts should be allocated to each of these study groups.
3. The LDCs and the African Group should propose that at least 60-70 percent of the resources committed to the Trust Fund be allocated for activities relating to LDCs. Such a target should be an integral part of request to donors. To ensure that such a target is implemented, rigorous evaluation and monitoring procedures should established.
4. Resources of the Trust Fund should be untied and fully fungible. In particular, donors should not be given the latitude to pick and choose the programmes they wish to fund.
5. In order to ensure that the resources of the Trust Fund benefit developing countries, expenditures for items such as hiring of headquarter staff, experts and consultants are significantly reduced, kept to a minimum and in any case follow UN rules and regulations. Similar care and adherence to UN rules is warranted with respect to equipment expenditures, travel, mission costs and so-called in-house training.
6. In support of the above, the LDCs and the African Groups should propose the establishment of a joint body with senior management of UNCTAD to monitor compliance with priorities and objectives of a completely revised programme of support. Ì

* The author is the SEATINI representative in Geneva, Switzerland.

KRUEGER PLAN ON SOVEREIGN DEBT AVOIDS THE ISSUE
Chakravarthi Raghavan*

The latest ideas floated by the IMF deputy managing director, Anne Krueger, on sovereign debt restructuring, slightly modifying her initial ideas unveiled last November, will still provide no solution to the problems of sovereign debt, experts in international finance and debt issues, suggest.

Even the latest modifications have failed to win the support of the US, which with its voting power can block any such changes under the IMF decision-making. But the US opposition cannot provide any strength to a faulty plan.

In her speech in Washington earlier this week, Krueger indicated a modification of her original proposals, and said that under the new plan, the IMF would not play a role in the actual debt restructuring exercise, but that it would authorize a stand-still by a debtor country, blocking all creditor actions to seize assets, and enable the debtor country and the group of creditors to negotiate and agree on restructuring the debt by write-downs.

In the November proposals, Krueger had envisaged a much more central role for the IMF in the negotiations over debt restructuring between the sovereign debtor and the creditors, and in effect for the IMF to be able to impose conditionalities on the debtor country.

In her latest foray, Krueger has said that while an IMF authorization would be required to enable a country in debt to activate a stay on its debt services and payments (declare a stand-still, imposing temporary exchange and capital controls), the restructuring would be by negotiations between the sovereign debtor government and a creditors committee.

As in the initial stance on the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt exercises, the IMF and the World Bank are trying to ensure that the debts owed to them would not be 'restructured' or 'written down'.
However, critics say that this would have to give way, and the Bretton Woods Institutions whose policies (in advancing the interests of their major share-holders, through the neo-liberal policies of the Washington consensus) have been responsible, would have to take a 'hair-cut' themselves, with the major share-holder governments paying the price.

The debt restructuring, through some form of international bankruptcy procedures, patterned on the lines of Chapter 11 of the US bankruptcy code, had been mooted as early as 1986 by the UN Conference on Trade and Development. In the wake of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, UNCTAD dusted up these ideas and proposed international bankruptcy procedures and use of Article VIII of the IMF Articles of Agreement for asking the countries concerned to impose capital controls.

The UNCTAD proposals, involved not merely a body outside the IMF for renegotiating and restructuring. With the IMF as one of the creditors, there is a conflict of interest, and even any initial IMF role to enable countries to call a stand-still (as Krueger now envisages) cannot resolve this.

The debt restructuring plans and the issues of foreign capital and capital flows is no doubt only a short- to medium-term approach, to be taken as part of a much larger attempt at changing and reforming the international financial architecture.

The post-war architecture had envisaged policies to achieve full employment and rapid growth. The IMF and the World Bank were to provide monetary and financial stability, while an international trading system (the International Trade Organization, envisaged under the Havana Charter) would promote freer trade and a gradual reduction of barriers to trade. The founders (White and Keynes) envisaged an architecture, where capital flows will be controlled, and enable freer flow of goods across borders, with the IMF to provide temporary finance to meet balance-of-payments problems on the current account, while its articles prevented access of countries to IMF funds for capital transactions and capital outflows.

However, the neo-liberal dogma unleashed in the 1980s, resulted in freeing capital (and more recently hot money) to flow across capitals, and thus increasing the strains on trade. In such circumstances, the IMF and its programs took on a life of their own, with developing and transition economies seeking IMF help and conditional funds, caught up in perpetual dependency and control of the IMF, and promoting the interests of capital owners and capital flows, as against trade and employment.

The combination of preference for private capital flows over official, exchange rate flexibility resulting in distorting trade flows by volatile or unstable exchange rates (rather than traditional trade theories of comparative advantage), and sending wrong market signals for investments, has created major problems of instability and a return to mercantilist policies of a by-gone era.

This is the cause of the challenges and growing civil society protests, whether of the IMF and the World Bank at one end or the WTO at the other.

Neither Doha (WTO meeting and new trade negotiations) nor Monterrey (Conference on Financing for Development) have come to grips with the core issues. And the rhetoric about 'free trade' - whether from Washington or Brussels - cannot paper over the crisis.

The effort, whether of the IMF management or the Washington establishment, to preserve and enhance the rights and advantages of private capital to enter and exit countries, and whether under official or creditor-managed restructuring to force countries and their consumers and poor to tighten belts to pay off debts, will be unable to cure this growing cancer that xxx. Cancers before they metastasize need to be surgically excised. Ì

[The Author is the Chief Editor of the South-North Development Monitor, SUNS.
The article has been reproduced by permission from SUNS. It appeared in SUNS No. 5092]

DIRECTOR'S COMMENT: LOOKING AHEAD - PUTTING UPFRONT PEOPLES' CONDITIONALITIES

[The author presented this speech at the NGO round-table at the occasion of the United Nations' International Conference on Financing for Development held in Monterrey, Mexico, 14-24 March 2002]

First of all, I would like to endorse the common position that some NGOs have agreed on, a copy of which is with you. In this regard, I'd like to recall that the genesis of the Financing for Development Conference (FfD) was the East Asia meltdown and its systemic threats. Developing countries expected that FfD would lead to the launch of a fundamental reform of the monetary, financial and trading systems. Instead what we see is that the Bretton Woods/ World Trade Organisation (BW/WTO) bodies have hijacked the process. The Monterrey "Consensus" does not address, let alone deal with, the imbalances and asymmetries in the global economy and its institutions of governance. It is back to ODAs and trade liberalization; it is back to where we were before the Asian crisis. Now we have the crisis in Argentina, and efforts are made to get Argentina back to "normality", but no effort is made to carry out a fundamental reform of the global financial system, which is at the root of the crisis.
Looking ahead I see two big problems. These are:

a) the knowledge gap in the West
b) the gap between rhetoric and reality
The Knowledge Gap

The tragedy of the development process is that, at the level of ideas, the theoreticians of the World Bank, the IMF, the intellectual products of Western universities drive policies. The double tragedy is that many of our leaders in Africa are so impressed with these ideas that they believe they are scientific. They acquire authority because they bear the stamp of the World Bank/IMF/WTO. I wish to put it to you that the eclectic broth that these "experts" serve is pseudo-science masquerading as science. Actually, there is no unified or accepted body of development economics or of monetary and trade theories, only bits and pieces of partial knowledge.

For example, after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, many Western-educated economists welcomed the free market exchange system. But events since 1970s have defied them. They do not even have the knowledge to understand the series of crises that we have witnessed. And now there are those who advocate fixed exchange rate (as in pre-crisis Argentina), those who advocate free-floating exchange system, and yet others who advocate multiple exchange rates. These "learned"economists not only differ among themselves but they do not know which system should be used where, when and why.

They apply the experiences of the developed countries to our countries. They are wrong about this. There are fundamental differences between developed and developing countries in their economic and political systems. When after the Asian crisis Malaysia adopted its own system, the IMF experts and the pseudo-scientists of Harvard & Yale decried Mahatthir Mohammed. And yet Malaysia fared better than Indonesia and Thailand that swallowed IMF's medicine. Two questions arise:
1. Where do these pseudo-scientists of the IMF/WB derive their knowledge from? Why are they always one step behind the movement of history? The answer simply is that they DO NOT KNOW. Their knowledge has no credibility.
2. The second question is: why do third world leaders have such blind faith in them? Why do they not think for themselves using their own home-grown knowledge like Malaysia did? And the answer is twofold: One is that they have no confidence in themselves. And the second is that the IMF/WB and the donors come with money and consultants as sweeteners to distract our leaders from pursuing a self-reliant strategy.

Let me give you a second example - the myth about FDIs - Foreign Direct Investments. Our leaders have been led to believe by these pseudo-scientific "exerts" that we cannot have development in our countries without FDIs. There is much confusion here both in thought and in the collection of empirical evidence. The body that collects data on capital flows is the UNCTAD. Their annual reports seem to have acquired authority simply because they have impressive tables, and they are widely quoted. Actually, both their theoretical tools and empirical data are seriously flawed.

Misled by the UNCTAD and WB reports, our leaders fail to make a distinction between money and capital and between capital and FDIs. They make it appear as if the three are the same thing. Actually, FDIs are a package of money, expertise, technology, management systems, market knowledge, intellectual property, goodwill, and so on. When IMF or WB experts say, for example that "studies" or "research" shows that there is correlation between FDIs and say technology transfer, that is simply a deliberate distortion of the truth, for the truth is that neither capital nor technology transfers come unless you are strong enough to negotiate. And FDIs will not come just because you conform to the governance standards of the Western countries. That is part of the present day dogma that has no basis in reality. And yet many of our political leaders bend backwards to satisfy this dogma of pseudo-scientists in the hope that they would attract FDIs. They are just wrong and they are taking our people on the "road to serfdom" (to use Hayek's phrase) but under the dictatorship of foreign capital. FDIS ARE PRIMARILY INSTRUMENTS TO TRANSFER ASSET HOLDINGS FROM DOMESTIC CONTROL TO CONTROL BY WESTERN TRANSNATIONALS.

Gap Between Rhetoric And Reality

These days it is fashionable, even for the most undemocratic institutions of the WB, IMF and WB, to talk about partnership, community participation, and ownership of processes. Let me give you two examples of the gap between rhetoric and reality.

In 2001, some of our leaders in Africa worked out a "home grown" programme for Africa's development called New African Initiative (NAI). Although our leaders talk about "ownership" of the process by the people, and indeed exhort the people to mobilise themselves behind their efforts, the people are not consulted in the process. The first place they went with the NAI was to the donors, the OECD countries, the Bretton Woods institutions, and the owners of international private capital. Out of these consultations came the NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa's Development), which effectively subverted the original design and made it a donor-driven, or supply-driven, agenda. Those who were approached to supply capital put their own conditions on the document.

Into all future programmes, our leaders must be exhorted to put PEOPLE CONDITIONALITY before putting DONOR CONDITIONALITY. Since donors incessantly talk the idea of community participation and ownership by the people, they should have asked our leaders: "Have you first consulted with your people? If not, please do so first before we even consider your proposal."

We agree with the noble intentions expressed in NEPAD about self-reliance and Africa determining its own destiny. But the road that NEPAD wishes to take Africa is simply the road that has already failed Africa. Why don't the leaders consult with the people first? Why don't they allow the people to determine the course Africa should take rather than allow the owners of capital in the West to decide the course for Africa?

This is the problem we are now already encountering when some powerful countries of the North have threatened ostracizing certain countries in Africa by threatening that if they do not follow the strictures about governance as they decide them, then they will risk losing financial support for NEPAD. Why do our leaders create conditions that open them to such blackmails?

The second example is the way the WTO reached consensus at Doha at its fourth Ministerial. It had three levels of reality. At the formal or surface level, there was consensus because not a single country opposed the consensus. At the deeper level that is below the surface there is another reality. SEATINI will document the manner in which African countries were pressurized to agree on an agenda for which they are not prepared. Again at the formal level this is explained as an outcome of the process of give and take, you gain some and you lose some. In reality it is power driven process, and the African countries have lost very badly at Doha. Doha has been disastrous for Africa. The third level of reality is ideological. The Doha Declaration is marketed by the WTO as a Development Agenda. It is nothing of the kind.

This leads me the issue of capacity building. We were told in Doha that African countries would get technical assistance to enable them to negotiate at the fifth ministerial conference of the WTO. The WTO/UNCTAD have developed a "plan" to help developing countries to improve their negotiating capacity. In reality, this plan is purely supply driven. The developed countries are interested in pushing the so-called "new" Singapore issues which they forced on the developing countries at Doha. So out of the $17,5m that is given for technical assistance 60% is devoted to seminars and workshops aimed at making it appear that now that the developing countries have received "technical assistance" they should be ready for negotiations. This is manipulating technical assistance to serve donor, not recipient, interests.

We in Africa have not been given an opportunity to go into first analysing the impact of these issues on our economies. The four new Singapore issues - investment, competition policy, government procurement and trade facilitation - if liberalised will have disastrous consequences for Africa, especially African countries' ability to use investment, competition and Procurement policies as tools of economic management of their social and economic policies. The same is true on the question of industrial tariffs, the negotiations on which have already begun, even before we have had a chance to investigate the effects of the tariff reductions so far carried out. In fact, much of Africa is facing deindustrialisation as a result of premature liberalisation.

Once again, here, there is gap between rhetoric and reality. The whole participatory and ownership process is subverted by the WTO and the BW institutions by forcing agenda and the pace of liberalisation on our governments and our people before we are ready for them.

There is on the part of the OECD countries and the intergovernmental agencies a desperate attempt to try to resolve their own global crises by foisting them on our countries. That explains the almost indecent haste with which they want to push the negotiations for the Doha agenda and for NEPAD. These negotiations must be stopped in their tracks. The people must be put first; they must be consulted first if the negotiations are to receive any kind of credibility and support from the people. The ignorance of the so-called Bretton Woods and WTO experts is appalling, and verge on ignorance about our countries and pure dogma. Our leaders must put faith in their people, rather than on these "experts".

So I'll end with two slogans:
· PEOPLE CONDITIONALITY BEFORE DONOR CONDITIONALITY.
· PUT FAITH IN THE PEOPLE, NOT ON NEO-LIBERAL PSEUDO-EXPERTS. Ì

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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