WTO & Pakistan: Ideas without Ideology; Ideologies without Ideas Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Bill Koehnlein The NEWS - Political Economy Section (02/06/02) No more ideologies, please Both the government and the civil society lack a research-based discourse on the impacts of WTO and its related agreements. by Dr. Abid Qaiyum Suleri Emma Duncan in her book Breaking the Curfew portrays Pakistanis as being a nation that has ideas without any ideology, and ideologies without any idea. I cannot agree more with her when I observe how, we, as a nation, are trying to prepare ourselves to meet the challenges of World Trade Organisation (WTO) regime. It is said that WTO is a bicycle, which collapses if it does not move forward. Nobody, however, realises that in our case the bicycle is continuously moving in a circle, and I doubt if it is moving any forward. There is a lack of discourse on the issue and most of the stakeholders are not clear about their positions. Various people continue talking about the organisation from their respective ideological positions without having any idea what it really means. Two schools of thought prevail in Pakistan about the impacts of different WTO agreements on the country. One group feels that these agreements are a panacea for every ill we are suffering from. They believe that there is a strong positive effect of free trade on the provision of enabling conditions for poverty reduction through enhanced provision of direct and indirect employment opportunities, social welfare services, and infrastructure that can potentially benefit the poor. This is the view taken by the proponents of "trickle down" hypothesis. The second group, one the other hand, declares that WTO is a curse and everything going wrong in developing countries is the result of the WTO agreements. They feel that WTO is rich men's club, meant to exploit the interest of developing world. Most of the positions taken on WTO issues in Pakistan lack an empirical research and are based on assumptions. Nobody tries to understand that WTO is a member-based, rule-based organisation which in itself is neither good, nor bad. Those who can maneuver the rules get benefited from it and rich nations, by virtue of their better bargaining position, are able to do so. The developing countries are far behind in this process not only due to the reason that they don't have the required capacity and understanding but also due to the fact that they lack political and administrative will to change the status quo. This lack of discourse manifests itself in strange and sometimes comical ways. Take, for example, the case of two ministers of the present government who took entirely contradictory positions on WTO only because there exists no single government policy vis-a-vis the trade organisation and the agreements that it stands for. The radical position taken by our commerce minister at WTO ministerial conference at Doha in November 2001 was totally reversed when the finance minister signed an Agricultural Structural Reforms loan agreement with Asian Development Bank. At Doha, Pakistan emerged as a "Champion of Development Box". Backed by various other developing countries, Pakistan demanded exemption of national food security crops from import tariff reduction commitments under Agreement on Agriculture. Pakistan also demanded that developing countries should be allowed to provide domestic support to the food security crops. Moreover, appropriate flexibility was demanded for developing countries to be able to promote exports. But the supporters of Pakistan's development box proposal (Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Malaysia, and many more) should have been shocked after coming to know about loan agreement between the Asian Development Bank and Pakistan just a month after the Doha meeting. By signing the agreement, Pakistan made a commitment to retreat from everything that it demanded in the development box. Under the agreement, Pakistan committed to abolish support price mechanism for various crops (including wheat and sugarcane), abolish food departments, downsize agricultural research institutes and open up the grain storage sector to private investors. All of these reforms would take place over a period of next five years. The effects of this agreement have already started to show. Take the case of wheat procurement by the government this year. Despite President Musharraf's pre-referendum assurance to buy every grain of wheat from the growers on government support price, one can hear the hues and cries of wheat growers who feel being left alone by the government. Under a visible compliance with the ADB agreement, most of the "flag centers" established by Punjab Food Department to procure wheat from the farmers of remote areas in the past years were closed down this year, leaving the helpless farmers on the mercy of middle men or on the vast discretionary powers of food department officials. The whole affair is proof enough that our policymakers are not clear as far as their understanding of the WTO agreements is concerned. They, instead, are trying to run the affairs of the state on ad-hoc basis. The lack of clarity is not something specific to the government. Most of our civil society organisations (the term civil society organisations must be taken in much broader context than merely referring to NGOs) are also not clear in their discourses on the issue and are very rigid on the positions they have already taken. Some of the issues where lack of clarity is very obvious are market access and environmental standards contained in WTO agreements. Some groups who blame WTO of being unfriendly towards the poor are also demanding tougher environmental policies without realising that these standards can be potential trade barriers for developing nations. The problem of discourse becomes even complicated when different partner organisations in a network try to adopt a collective position. One can easily find contradictions in the individual and collective positions of various organisations when they get together in a network. The developed world through its international funding agencies, however, is trying to build the capacity of different stakeholders in Pakistan to promote a better understanding of the trade issues. Most of these capacity building efforts are limited to arranging seminars and workshops. These initiatives are not completely useless. However, one needs to be careful to distinguish between "capacity building" and "quality capacity building". In most of the WTO capacity building workshops, resource persons keep on imposing their assumed positions about the WTO agreements on the participants without an empirical research or understanding of the issues to back their assumptions. I think it is about time to think rationally and pro-actively about WTO. Let us have our ideas based on research-oriented ideologies and our ideologies based on well-researched ideas. The best strategy is to start empirical research on the implications of different WTO agreements on various fields of life in Pakistan. Let the findings of our research guide our positions. The best way to manoeuvre the WTO agreements in our favour is by understanding them with a holistic approach and trying to work out how effectively we can play with the rules to make them work for our benefit. Otherwise, we will keep on blaming other nations of being unfair to us. ********************************************************************* "The first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated." --José Martí ********************************************************************* The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory http://www.toplab.org ********************************************************************* ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytas-06.06.02-13:17:30-19231