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Sat 6 Sep, 2003 10:29 am
Two worlds prepare for a showdown in a Mexican nest of vipers
Next week's Cancun trade summit is being held in a rich playground beside a vast slum
John Vidal, environment editor
Saturday September 6, 2003 - The Guardian
Thirty-five years ago there was little trade on Kan Kun island, in the remotest corner of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. It was a series of pristine white sandbars in a calm blue sea. Only three fishermen lived there, and only for part of the year.
But in the early 1970s it was discovered by international bankers, who thought they had found financial paradise, and the world's first purpose-built giant holiday resort was built.The ancient Mayan name Kan Kun -which means "nest of vipers" - was softened to the more tourist-friendly Cancun.
Next week 10,000 trade ministers and other government delgates, up to 20,000 Mexican peasants, students and intellectuals, 5,000 activists from international pressure groups and 2,000 media personnel from 146 countries will gather there for the biennial global trade summit. They will find themselves in one of two worlds.
In the hotel zone 12 miles of sandbars have been replaced with the fantastical skyline of modern industrial tourism - 200 luxury hotels plus casinos, fast-food joints and tacky pleasure palaces. The lagoons, coral reefs and wetlands are now irrevocably destroyed. Last month a Cancun marine park imported 36 dolphins from the Solomon Islands. World Trade Organisation delegates will be invited to swim with them for $86 (£54) a time, or pet them for $45.
In the other world, nine miles away across a narrow spit of land, a sprawling city of about 300,000 people has grown in the past 30 years to serve the tourists. Environment and development groups say that up to 40% of them live without sewerage or piped water, lucky to earn $10 a day.
Yesterday the two Cancuns were preparing for next week's ritual showdown of competing world views. The federal police, working with the army, have thrown a two-mile exclusion zone around the hotel area and out to sea, and will heavily guard the two access points.
Seven checkpoints will separate the town and the convention centre where the delegates meet. The authorities are preparing for trouble . This week the cheif of police said he would "trade blow for blow" with protesters. He is reported top have reserved a bullring and a football stadium in which to detain people.
Build-up
The activists believe that a "criminalisation campaign" against them has already begun in the press. "There are daily articles about foreign instigators, over 200,000 people coming, about folks bringing explosives and so on," said Lisa, an activist with Rant in California.
Pablo, a Mexican student, said: "We've seen a militaristic build-up, spying on activists, and intimidation of people on the streets. There is the sense that the police are becoming more autonomous of the civil authorities and present a real danger of provoking violence."
Although there will be direct action protests, neither the police nor the protesters realistically expect anything like the 1999 WTO summit in Seattle, when a national emergency was called - if only because the two worlds will be mostly kept well apart. The real confrontation is expected to be between competing ideas about how to tackle world poverty.
In the convention centre the debate will be held mostly in "green rooms" to which the press has no access. There the agenda will be largely devoted to agricultural subsidies and drug patents, the developed countries pushing for the WTO to move into new areas of foreign investment.
To the Mexican government, and many of the ministers and delegates, Cancun is a model of globalisation, showing just what the international economy can do for an impoverished place.
The tourist zone brings in up to 30% of all Mexico's foreign earnings and employs more than 70,000 people. But in the town of Cancun hundreds of Latin American peasant, student, trade union and indigenous groups will be debating free-trade zones, privatisation, sustainable alternatives, fair trade, and what they call the theft of their genetic resources. Many grassroots groups report that resistance is growing to proposed new free-trade areas and World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programmes.
New colonialism
Many regard Cancun as the worst of all possible worlds - a new "colonialism" which sucks money out of Mexico and impoverishes lives. The stars of the fringe show are expected to be Mayan leaders and the publicity-shy Zapatistas from the nearby state of Chiapas, who took up arms a decade ago against the Mexican government, largely in protest against free-trade zones and globalisation.
Walden Bello, a leading Malaysian economist,delivered a message to the Mexican government on behalf of the protesters this week.
"You shouldn't worry about us, since we come [to Cancun] simply to defend our ideas and our rights," he said. "You should worry, instead, about defending Mexican sovereignty from the security forces of the US during the meeting."
Yesterday international pressure groups called for help for poor Mexicans to travel to Cancun. "People want to go to Cancun to be heard," said Peter Rossett, an American activist who has just returned from a tour of the desperately poor farming region beyond the tourist resort.
"People are really angry at how free trade has driven down crop prices. They just cannot afford the very expensive bus fares and cost of food for a week in Cancun and their organisations cannot afford to rent buses. In just one rural area, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, it would cost more than $70,000 to get everyone who wants to go to Cancun there."
Raul, a forestry worker from outside Mexico City working with Friends of the Earth-Mexico, said: "The people of Cancun are a bit frightened. They see convoys of army and police coming in and they don't know what will happen."
"Next week's Cancun trade summit is being held in a rich playground beside a vast slum "
Only one comment: it's crap. Absolute crap.
WTO-CANCUN: Future Uncertain After Collapse of Talks
WTO-CANCUN: Future Uncertain After Collapse of Talks
Diego Cevallos - IPS - 9/15/03
CANCUN, Mexico, Sep 14 (IPS) - The WTO ministerial conference in the Mexican resort of Cancun came to an abrupt end Sunday without an agreement, leaving a big question mark hanging over the future of the international trade talks.
The negotiations have collapsed, the positions are very distant, and there is no possibility of reaching an accord, at least for now, said delegates of several governments. The talks will continue at WTO (World Trade Organisation) headquarters in Geneva, they added.
The sensation of failure with which the five-day gathering ended triggered a burst of elation among activists and the representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), who gave shouts of joy and even jumped up and down and danced when they heard the news that no final statement had been agreed.
The trade ministers of the 146 WTO member countries hoped to agree on a final declaration Sunday, or else planned to continue meeting through Monday. But after hours of intense negotiations, the gridlock remained, despite the Mexican government's efforts until the last minute -- as host -- to achieve a compromise statement.
''Talks have collapsed and there is no agreement. It's over. We'll see each other at the next meeting in two years,'' George Odour Ong'wen, a member of the Kenyan delegation, told journalists.
The chairman of the WTO conference, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Derbez, said it made no sense to continue the discussions, because the positions were irreconcilable.
This is the second failed WTO conference since the world body was created in 1995. Talks also collapsed at the third ministerial meeting in the U.S. city of Seattle, Washington in 1999, amid massive street protests by the so-called ''anti-globalisation'' movement.
''This is a triumph of reason, a triumph of the poor countries and civil society, because we could not allow the rich countries to once again impose their views and their pressure,'' Alberto Villareal, the head of the environmental group Friends of the Earth International's trade campaign, told IPS.
In the last stretch of the talks, the ministers were working with a draft statement presented by Mexican government officials Saturday, which failed to resolve the question of farm subsidies, and did not set timeframes or deadlines for meeting certain commitments agreed in the Doha Development Agenda, which emerged from the last WTO conference two years ago.
The draft document also left pending the possibility of whether or not to move forward on ''new issues'' like cross-border investment and transparency in government procurement.
The draft statement, which was drawn up on the basis of the positions expressed in four days of talks, disappointed virtually everyone. The government delegates worked hard Sunday, without success, to achieve a consensus.
''If we reach no agreement here, we may go home with empty hands, a huge debt to developing countries, and doubts regarding the future of the WTO,'' a member of the Brazilian delegation commented to IPS before the talks broke down.
Huge discrepancies between rich and poor countries, and among developing countries, persisted up to the end, said the source.
The meeting opened Sep. 10 with a marked polarisation between the world's richest nations -- the United States, the members of the European Union (EU) and Japan -- and a growing bloc of developing countries, led by Brazil, India and China, which has come to be called the Group of 22 (G-22).
After the failure of the talks was announced, the delegates of several G-22 members -- Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and South Africa -- told reporters that the bloc would remain united in future negotiations, wherever they were held. The talks on trade in agriculture will continue, they stressed.
Government delegates admitted that the draft declaration was extremely limited in scope.
The document, which aimed at a compromise, merely stated that the 146 WTO member countries reaffirmed their commitment to moving towards the objective of reducing the farm subsidies of industrialised nations, without setting timetables or targets for doing so.
It also stated that the eventual phasing out of subsidies would only apply to certain products.
''They are trying to reinterpret the mandates set out in the Doha declaration,'' which is unacceptable, said Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorin.
With respect to the majority of issues on which some kind of agreement was hoped for, the draft document only mentioned a commitment to continue negotiating at WTO headquarters in Geneva, under the Doha Development Agenda.
At the fourth WTO conference, held in Doha, the capital of Qatar, in 2001, the member countries agreed to move towards an international trade system that would help pull developing nations out of poverty.
The Doha round of trade talks was to have been completed by Jan. 1, 2005, but many observers already doubted that would happen, even before Sunday's failure in Cancun.
''The WTO has lead feet, and is moving slower and slower. I don't foresee a good future for it,'' said Villareal.
Since the Doha conference, the world's governments have failed to reach agreement on how and when to phase out agricultural subsidies, which amount to a combined total of over one billion dollars a day in the United States and the EU.
''Frustration'' and ''discouragement'' were among the words repeated by government delegates when referring to the draft ministerial statement.
The most optimistic view, expressed by some delegations, was that the document was a ''starting-point'' from which to continue negotiating.
In the corridors of the conference Sunday, there was an air of worry and concern among the delegates, many of whom had warned at the start of the meeting that another failure would deal a harsh blow to the international trade system, which began to emerge in the late 1940s.
The only thing we all agree on so far is that no one accepts the draft declaration, but we are working on refining it and on reaching an agreement, WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell said late Saturday.
Activists said the document ran counter to the interests of the developing world. Greenpeace Mexico spokesman Alejandro Calvillo told IPS that ''it's a good thing that this ended without an agreement.''
Europe and the United States are pushing developing countries into the abyss, and that was already seen in the base document for the Cancun meeting, said Friends of the Earth representative Ronnie Hall.
Phil Bloomer, with the British relief group Oxfam, said the WTO talks would never be the same again. Cancun failed due to the power and cohesion of developing countries, he maintained.
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