The opening day of the Ministerial conference of the WTO followed a now-standard format: mass protests on the outside, disruption of the opening ceremony by NGOs accredited to attend the fringes of the meeting, and preliminary skirmishes over the process and the negotiating text.
For the public of Hong Kong the opening meant another protest march through the streets by an estimated 5200 local and overseas activists and accompanying tariff jams. Barriers now block people’s entry to parts of the city near the Convention Centre and police are much more visible than usual, displaying an alarming array of weaponry.
This march was very different from the first mobilization three days ago. Taking the place of the migrant women workers, who were the dominant presence on Sunday, were several thousand Korean farmers. A multi-coloured funeral pyre, symbolized both death to the WTO and ever-present memory of the self-sacrifice of Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae in Cancun in 2003. Most wore t-shirts that carried their blunt message –“WTO Kills Farmers”.
As people gathered in Victoria Park it was obvious the Koreans would play a central role. Relaxed, but strictly self-disciplined, they exuded an aura that is hard to describe.
The march itself was uneventful until it reached the designated demonstration area, a small concrete holding pen from which the only exit was over the wall into the sea. That is just what some 80 Korean farmers chose to do. Bedecked in bright orange lifejackets, with the lead swimmer holding a Korean flag, they aimed to swim (badly) to the Convention Centre where the meeting had just begun.
In a coordinated action, inside the Convention Centre 30 to 40 accredited NGO activists attempted to drown out the opening speech of Director General Pascal Lamy with placards and chanting. Using a similar strategy to Cancun, they held up multilingual signs reading ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’, ‘WTO Kills Farmers’, ‘Reject the Doha-Anti-Development Package’ and unfurled a large orange banner. The inevitable media scrum gave more publicity to the dissidents, outweighing the rather bland appeal from Lamy for a successful meeting. Most activists inside the conference halls have their badges on a necklace reading “No deal is better than a bad deal”, and here and there you start seeing official delegates having changed their necklaces.
Smaller protest activities continued throughout all of today, with an almost permanent presence of some hundred people at a designated “protest area” which, however, is hardly visible from inside the conference halls. The police continued to be very nervous, and rather than protesters, one saw groups of police men running here and there
The Negotiations
Attention now shifts to the inside the Convention Centre, where the first meetings on non-agricultural market access and services began last night – along with the first invitation-only Green Room meeting where the main decisions will be made and then conveyed to the majority of delegations who remain, excluded and frustrated, on the fringe.
Today was the first day of negotiations proper. However, there was very little movement in any of the negotiating areas, including in the green room meetings where most of the time was devoted to process issues. The day saw a PR exercise unfold for the US, EU and Japan with all three touting their loans and bribes in the form of empty 'aid for trade' packages. Serious questions were raised as to whether the proposals of the EU ($5 billion to Least Developed Countries, LDCs) and US ($2.7 billion in total to 2010) were able to paid for and what conditions would be attached to them. The Japanese model was harshly critiqued as being a loan program which would push LDCs further into debt.
Last night a new group meet for the first time comprised of the G90, G20 and G33 - with the Zambian Minister coining the term - the 'G110'. There is some excitement attached to this development with the enlarged group coming together reportedly to agree on key areas of negotiations. There were also consultations between cotton producers and the US, where it is reported that Benin walked out because the US had retracted promises made under the July Framework - that cotton would be treated 'specifically and expeditiously'. They will want to treat cotton as part of the agriculture negotiations, meaning there will not be a so called 'early harvest'.
Service negotiations (GATS) at centre stage
Of the three main items of negotiations (Agriculture, industrial goods, services), only the item “Services” will be negotiated in greater detail in these days. This is the result of the clever management of the Chair of the service negotiation group, who managed - against the protest of most developing countries – to sneak a complete text in the draft of the Final Declaration “under the responsibility of the Chair” (the texts on agriculture and industrial goods have the form of reports by the Chairs – i.e. stocktaking). Developing countries insisted that the whole text on services was least be put into one big bracket – meaning that it is not agreed upon. However, it remains in this form a text that appears ready for negotiations. The EU made it crystal clear that its main interest is indeed progress in the liberalization of services, and its immediate goal in HK is the approval of a text which allows the alignment of GATS along the lines of the other two baskets on agriculture and industrial goods – with numerical targets, percentages in total commitments ecc. Gone are the days in which the liberalization of services was supposed to be bottom-up and freely chosen.
The hopefully early drawning of the “Development Package”
WTO Secretary General Oascal Lamy and the ECs Peter Mandelson had put together a so-called “Development Package” in the weeks before the conference. In order to make a deal somewhat more attractive to the resilient members of especially the least developed countries. But things are not that easy any longer, to the great surprise of Mandelson, in particular. First statements of developing countries critizise the package rightly as an empty Christmas box. The whole approach has by now become quite painful for Mandelson, since the USA and Japan do not even want to support certain elements of the package. At an internal briefing today, Mandelson lashed out against the USA in so far unheard words – putting the blame squarely to the US, should HK fail to at least deliver a somewhat strengthened consensus on how to continue from here.
Will HK have an outcome?
As of today, it seems highly unlikely that this HK Ministerial conference will advance the Doha Agenda even an inch. But we must remain very alert. With today, the big poker has started, and the cards will be put on the table maybe only on the last day, Sunday. In the meantime, the important negotiations do not take place in the plenary hall, but in various Green Room and caucus meetings that often extent to early morning hours. What makes observers uncomfortable here, is already the mere fact that HK has shifted into a negotiation gear, while only some weeks ago it was supposed to be rather a stock-taking exercise only.
Diwedd/Ends.
