A look at the WTO wrap-up in Hong Kong

the delegates managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat and rescue the trade talks in hong kong from complete collapse but, as i posted last week, perhaps no agreement at all would have been preferable... as predicted, the poorest nations took it in the shorts - again...

The final text salvaged from around-the-clock global trade talks here sets a deadline to end farm export subsidies by rich nations, a long-time demand by developing nations, but also binds poorer countries to more dramatically open their markets to multinational corporations.

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The final text sets 2013 as the deadline for dismantling controversial multi-billion-dollar export subsidies given by the European Union and countries like the United States every year.

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"This watered-down text leaves out the most important issues for the WTO to address -- agricultural dumping, creating employment, and promoting development," said Sophia Murphy of the U.S-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

The United States successfully resisted slashing its domestic support to cotton producers, a setback for Brazil and four West African cotton exporters which had hoped the meetings here would commit the United States, the world's largest producer and exporter of cotton, to eliminate several aspects of its support programme.

The text does allow for a cut in export subsidies, the lesser form of cotton support, by 2006.

On industrial goods, the document proposes to cut tariffs using the so-called Swiss formula, one of the most radical ways to reduce tariffs. Anti-poverty activists say this will open fragile industries in developing countries to unfair competition from powerful multinationals.

"Such steep cuts will have a disastrous impact on developing countries' ability to build up an industrial base and to protect their natural resource base," said Murphy.

The text also obliges developing nations to sweeping negotiations to further open their markets in services like banking, insurance and utilities, which could signal another wave of privatisation and deregulation like that championed by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

let's be brutally honest here... the developed world wants, more than anything else, to have unrestricted access and unabridged control of the world's MONEY... that is precisely why the insistence on open markets in financial services...

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