So-called free trade talks should be in the public, not corporate interest

[dipsydoodle]

A cotton worker in India. The US refusal to eliminate its cotton and other agricultural subsidies torpedoed the Doha round of trade talks. Photograph: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.

Though nothing has come of the World Trade Organisation's Doha development round of global trade negotiations since they were launched almost a dozen years ago, another round of talks is in the works. This time the negotiations will not be held on a global, multilateral basis. Rather, two huge regional agreements – one transpacific, and the other transatlantic – are to be negotiated. Are the coming talks likely to be more successful?

The Doha round was torpedoed by the US refusal to eliminate agricultural subsidies – a sine qua non for any true development round, given that 70% of those in the developing world depend on agriculture directly or indirectly. The US position was truly breathtaking, given that the WTO had already judged that America's cotton subsidies – paid to fewer than 25,000 rich farmers – were illegal. Washington's response was to bribe Brazil, which had brought the complaint, not to pursue the matter further, leaving in the lurch millions of poor cotton farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and India, who suffer from depressed prices because of America's largesse to its wealthy farmers.

Given this recent history, it now seems clear that the negotiations to create a free trade area between the US and Europe, and another between the US and much of the Pacific (except for China), are not about establishing a true free trade system. Instead, the goal is a managed trade regime – managed, that is, to serve the special interests that have long dominated trade policy in the west.

There are a few basic principles that those entering the discussions will, one hopes, take to heart. First, any trade agreement has to be symmetrical. If, as part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the US demands that Japan eliminate its rice subsidies, Washington should, in turn, offer to eliminate its production (and water) subsidies, not just on rice (which is relatively unimportant in the US) but on other agricultural commodities as well.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2013/jul/05/free-trade-talks-public-corporate-interest