Is the World Trade Organization (WTO) turning out to be a platform to fight a war of attrition between developing and developed world? What is happening on the sidelines of the world body created for ensuring orderly growth of the global trade is lending credence to that perception. Every meeting of the august body echoes bitterness and animosity.
Recently, India has taken the initiative to stitch a coalition of nine countries including from Africa to stress special provisions for developing countries and to fight against high farm subsidies given by the developed world as also against their stand on matters like pushing non-mandated subjects like e-commerce, women empowerment etc into the negotiating table to serve their (developed countries’) interests. The combined stand of the nine developing countries, which have formed the group, is that special and differential treatment (S&DT) provisions to developing countries is a non –negotiable right irrespective of their trade share. They also, maintain that all countries should have an equal say in the decision making of WTO and the developed world should not hijack that power. Recently, the US and Canada, along with other developed countries have openly questioned the developing world’s right to have special privileges. The countries in the group are South Africa, India, Bolivia, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tunisia, and Malawi.
In the meantime, countries like China, US, Canada and Norway have submitted a reform agenda to the WTO for diluting the rights and privileges under S&DT. The US stand is that such benefits should not be granted to emerging economies like India and Brazil, which are at a higher benchmark of growth as compared to most of the developing countries and not to speak of the least developed world. That had resulted in the US withdrawing the age-old benefit of Generalized Special Preferences (GSP) to India in recent times, which did not go well with the business community of India.
The arguments voiced by the countries which are affected by the tough stand of the US is that developing countries as a group may require higher transition time to reach a trajectory to compete with the developed world. Also, there can be pockets in developing countries, where developments would have reached the people because of historical reasons. However, most of the people are still living in the underdevelopment cycle. They feel that by taking away the benefits which they are enjoying would create distortions particularly in the export front, where they have visible handicaps in terms of poor infrastructure, erratic energy supply, higher rates of interest etc.
Admittedly, the developing countries are increasingly realizing that fighting such issues alone will not be of much consequences against the mighty powers of the developed world. There were efforts earlier also to cobble up a sort of alliance among the developing countries to put up a joint stand against provisions that go against their common interests. However, experts are of the opinion that the polarization of the views and perceptions on the basis of categorization of developed and developing countries, may not be possible since there can be the possibility of a lack of consensus among the developing countries also on many development issues.
