PERUGIA: To reform or reject the World Trade Organisation — that is the question raised in this mediaeval and hugely picturesque Italian town that is hosting the 5th UN Peoples’ Assembly, sub-titled “Europe and the World”.

Participants at the assembly are saying that the failure of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial talks held in Cancun, Mexico, in September is evidence that the world body is in urgent need of an overhaul.

The result, or lack of it, “showed that unity among poorer African countries can pay off,” said Achin Vanaik of the Transnational Institute. India, a country that is widely seen as having held up and fought for the interests of the South, “was not as significant as it seemed to be in the G22,” Vanaik told IPS.

The hastily-named Group of 22 (G22 or G20+) included Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey and Venezuela.

The bloc formed just weeks before the WTO meeting to act as a counterweight to the European Union (EU) and United States. Colombia and Peru have since dropped out.

The G22 is made up of over half of the world’s population and almost two-thirds of the world’s farmers, a section that produces more than one-fifth of global agricultural output. The Cancun outcome, said Vanaik, “showed that smaller countries can make a difference” and that it was particularly a “victory for the small farmers, who characterise most poor countries”.

“What happened at Cancun was that the EU was stymied by the ad-hoc functioning of the opposing bloc,” said one delegate in Perugia. “They were uncertain of where the pressure was to be applied, of the pressure points.”

Whether the new balance of power within the WTO will affect a meeting between its 146 members in Geneva in December is still being debated, but participants at the assembly here warn that it cannot be assumed that the fundamental problems will be addressed, or that there will be a departure from the usual approach of “applying pressure and deal-making”.

“The options are: to tinker with the WTO to make it work better; to demand a complete systemic reform of the WTO; or to reject it entirely and have instead another system,” said Vanaik. “The key lies in the political will — if our leaders don’t have it, it will not work.”

Martin Khor, the director of the Third World Network, a civil society group based in Malaysia, has on several occasions been blunt about what he sees as the world trade body’s main failing.

He has called for the decision-making system in the WTO to be reformed so that developing country members can participate more effectively, especially in the drafting of texts, and has advocated the setting up of a committee in the WTO to carry out democratic reforms.

Yet leadership, whether in the South or the North, is being questioned universally. Eveline Herfkens, the UN Secretary General’s executive coordinator for the Millennium Development Goals Campaign, said in a statement here that “the North does not practice the free trade it preaches”.

In a damning illustration, she pointed out that if Africa were to increase its share of world exports by one percent, this would generate about 70 billion dollars — about five times what the continent receives in aid.

“Developed countries’ trade policy remains highly discriminatory against precisely those products produced in the poorest countries, especially agriculture and textiles,” she told the Assembly on Friday.

Equally, the idea of growth being good, of trade as being the engine of growth, and of the WTO as the mechanism that administers this process is coming under fire. “This is disastrous — it relies on the multiplying of needs,” said Vanaik. “We must move away from this conception. There are alternative thoughts. One which has been in the literature for some time is that of development, the expanding of human capabilities.”—Dawn/InterPress News Service.