Global Trade Ethics: Towards a Socially Responsible World Trade Organization (Wto) (Paperback) | Released: 11 Jan 2013

Jawara and Kwa (2003: 77) point out to a report that the US maintains a blacklist of 'unhelpful' third world trade negotiators who are regarded as 'agitators', and that often, these are forced to resign their posts or their home governments are pressured to recall them home and re-assign them...the WTO is a world of manipulation and threats, if not bribes; to ensure developed countries get their way at the expense of poor nations, as ActionAid (2006) reports that: "The livelihood of millions of the world's poorest people are threatened by negotiations that are taking place right now [in 2006], in the preparation for the World Trade Organization's meeting in Hong Kong. Rich countries are seeking new export markets for their agricultural produce, industrial products and services. They want all countries, including the poorest, to sign up to new trade commitments that will further open up their economies to international competition...If the rich countries aren't stopped, poverty and inequality in many of the countries in which we work could deepen (p. iv)" The TWN and ActionAid therefore share similar view on the WTO, which are backed by realities on the ground, exemplified by a few items: removal of subsidies from subsistence agriculture in the third world while they are maintained in EU and American large scale agriculture, massive privatization that has gone into the hands of mainly foreign capitalists while back in the US and within the EU failing banks are being shored up with public money. Similar voices were echoed in a joint statement by several NGOs after the Hong Kong Ministerial in 2006: "Agriculture remains the sector containing most trade distortions and the Uruguay Round's promise of liberalisation in the rich countries has yet to be fulfilled...While developed countries stubbornly refuse to deal with dumping or end their protection, developing countries are being pressured to reduce drastically their own agricultural tariffs, thus laying their small farmers open to more unfair competition from artificially cheapened import." (http: //www. twnside.org.sg/ announcement/ngo statement.htm accessed 27 October 2010)...ActionAid (2006) reports further that the goal in all these negotiations is to push for market access even at the expense of the more morally grounded quest, the one for poverty reduction: "In UNCTAD's view, what the current approach does is to take trade liberalisation as a given and then see how to make poverty reduction goals compatible with it, rather than to make poverty reduction a priority and ask how trade liberalisation might fit into this (p. 5)" ...it is valid here to hold the opinion that the interests of the majority of WTO members were not being addressed, which made the negotiators from the said four countries mentioned to adopt an obstinate stance. Their unwillingness to budge was therefore in the interest of their poor countries. In doing so, they stood in the way of global commercial interests. The only solution would thus be to overrule them with a word from their own capitals, as we have noted above, or have them replaced. In other words political pressure was exerted through elected leadership and cabinet ministers. Semboja et al. (2002: 6) see in this and in globalization generally ..".the erosion of national control over governance and culture...." This situation is generally characterized by more and more conspicuous involvement of the private sector into public welfare domains that were traditionally reserved for the state, which Scholte (2000) refers to as "privatization of governance." This view is supported by the LWF (2003: 114) which lists the prominent features of globalization as including: "mobility across borders, deregulation, a growing corporate power that is unaccountable to the public, commoditisation of life, homogenization of culture and products, speculative investments and, lastly, loss of national sovereignty."