George Monbiot (Guardian Unltd): A threat to the rich [View All]

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Tuesday September 16

A threat to the rich
Forcing the poor countries to walk out of the Cancun trade talks may rebound on the west
By George Monbiot

Were there a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, it would be awarded this year to Pascal Lamy, the EU's trade negotiator. A week ago, in the Guardian's trade supplement, he argued that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) "helps us move from a Hobbesian world of lawlessness into a more Kantian world - perhaps not exactly of perpetual peace, but at least one where trade relations are subject to the rule of law".
On Sunday, by treating the trade talks as if, in Thomas Hobbes's words, they were "a war of every man against every man", Lamy scuppered the negotiations, and very possibly destroyed the organisation as a result. If so, one result could be a trade regime, in which, as Hobbes observed, "force and fraud are ... the two cardinal virtues". Relations between countries would then revert to the state of nature the philosopher feared, where the nasty and brutish behaviour of the powerful ensures that the lives of the poor remain short.
At the talks in Cancun, in Mexico, Lamy made the poor nations an offer that they couldn't possibly accept. He appears to have been seeking to resurrect, by means of an "investment treaty", the infamous Multilateral Agreement on Investment. This was a proposal that would have allowed corporations to force a government to remove any laws that interfered with their ability to make money, and that was crushed by a worldwide revolt in 1998.
In return for granting corporations power over governments, the poor nations would receive precisely nothing. The concessions on farm subsidies that Lamy was offering amounted to little more than a reshuffling of the money paid to European farmers. They would continue to permit the subsidy barons of Europe to dump their artificially cheap produce into the poor world, destroying the livelihoods of the farmers there.

Read more.
This is the final instalment of George Monbiot's series on trade published in the Guardian. For those who missed the first two installments, here is:

• Part One: The Worst of Times, September 2
• Part Two: The Myth of Localism, September 9

And now, let us raise a glass to the collapse of the Cancun talks and begin to deal with the problems of formulating a truly just world.