Hong Kong’s shaky outcome

THE Doha round of negotiations had an inauspicious beginning. The first attempt to begin the dialogue in 1991 ran into stiff resistance setup by a variety of non-governmental groups. They arrived at Seattle, the site of the meeting, determined to stop the start of a new set of discussions among the world’s trading nations.

Those who were against the launch of yet another round of negotiations had several grievances. These ranged from the belief that the previous round — the Uruguay round concluded in 1995 — had created a world trading regime that was of no use for the world’s poor. In fact, according to this line of thinking, the world trading order that resulted from the Marrakesh Treaty with which the Uruguay discussions concluded had created an unlevel playing field, tilted away from the developing world. The tilt was particularly sharp in two sectors of enormous interests for the developing world, agriculture and textiles.

There were reasons for the opposition of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to another global trade round. Many people believed that by creating an elaborate system of international trade rules, the Marrakesh Treaty provided considerable space to the large transnational corporations (TNCs) that dominated the world production system. This space was used to exploit the poor. Some NGOs that appeared at Seattle were concerned that the outsourcing of production that was resulting from the process of globalization and had the support of the World Trade Organization resulted in poor working conditions and low wages for the workers employed by the TNCs.

Several others were troubled by the fact that the Uruguay process had provided considerable authority to the world’s rich nations to protect patents — or intellectual property rights — even at the cost of not providing cheap medicines to the sick in the developing world. For instance, the drugs needed for slowing down the progress of Aids could be produced in the developing world at a fraction of the cost charged by the large pharmaceutical companies. That this could be done was demonstrated by some pharmaceutical companies in India who defied the rules and supplied cheap Aids drugs to the poor countries of Africa. This could not be done more openly since any infringement of patents could be severely punished by the WTO.

And then, there were NGOs which went to Seattle to make the point that the rules governing the international production system allowed considerable latitude to the TNCs to exploit physical resources in a way that caused grievous harm to the global environment. These corporations had to be constrained and made accountable to civil society since world governments had failed to draw up a programme for protecting the environment. For these and other reasons the demonstrations in Seattle turned violent and blood flowed in the streets of this city. The ministers who had assembled there slipped out of the city without coming to any agreement.

They met again at Doha, the capital of Qatar, in November 2001. They succeeded this time in launching a new round for two reasons. The Qataris were able to use the limited access to their capital to keep out potential troublemakers from the city. And, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States had convinced Washington that something quite significant had to be done to reduce the level of resentment that existed in the Muslim world against the West — particularly against America. There was a widespread feeling in the developing world that the global trading system discriminated against them.

This discrimination had taken at least three different forms. The tariffs against the exports from the developing world were considerably higher than on the trade between developed countries. In some cases the use of tariffs was coupled with the use of quotas against their exports. This was the second cause of Third World’s resentment. The quotas were directed mostly at clothing and textiles.

Even before the launch of the Uruguay round industrial countries had operated a system called the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) that allowed limited exports of various items of textiles and clothing from poor to rich countries to come under quotas. The developing countries agreed to the conclusion of the Uruguay round and the establishment of the World Trade Organization only after it was promised that the MFA would be phased out over a 10-year period and by January 1, 2005, the MFA would be completely eliminated. This was done and the textile industry in the developing world began to quickly restructure and grow.

The third area of unhappiness among the developing countries consisted of subsidies given by rich counties to their farmers and the constraints placed on developing countries’ exports to the markets in rich countries. Under the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) large subsidies were given for the production of agricultural products such as rice, sugar and dairy products in which the developing world had a distinct comparative advantage. The United States also operated a farm support programme in which the items entering world trade fetched relatively low prices because of the subsidies given by Washington. The subsidies to the cotton producers were by far the most important policy that had a negative impact on the incomes of farmers in the developing world.

These unfriendly policies had one important consequence: they hurt the poorest people in the developing world. They hurt the semi-skilled workers employed in the developing countries’ textile sectors, a high proportion of whom were women. They hurt the poor cotton farmers of West Africa whose incomes fell because of the low price in the international market that resulted from cotton subsidies in the United States.

They hurt those developing countries where farmers could produce such high value crops as fruits and vegetables for export to high income markets, but market access was denied to them for various reasons. Phytosanitary regulations — regulations against plant products — were the most often used non-tariff barrier to keep out exports from the developing world.

It was the decision by the developed world — by the United States in particular — that the new round of negotiations would pay special attention to the demands of developing countries that led to the agreement to launch the Doha round. The US, traumatized by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, identified continuing slow growth, persistent poverty and deteriorating income distribution in the developing world as the reasons of the alienation of the youth and the direction of their anger at Washington. Trade, therefore, became one of the many weapons the United States was prepared to use in order to win over the hearts and minds of the people of the developing world.

However, trade is one area where good intentions seldom translate into action. The decision to focus, during the Doha round, on issues of interest to the developing world had the backing of economic theory. By addressing these issues rich nations, wedded to the principles of free markets, would be removing a number of serious distortions in international trade that hurt the developing world. It was calculated by a number of individuals and institutions that by removing these distortions, the developed world would be transferring incomes to the developing world that would be many times more than the official aid they provided.

Not only that, by removing these distortions, rich countries would be sending additional incomes directly into the pockets of the people. Administration of aid required of governments to act as intermediaries and they were often inefficient and corrupt. By allowing the poor to trade openly in world markets, incomes would flow to them without much intermediation.

The World Bank estimated in a study published in 2002 that freeing international trade of all barriers and subsidies would lift 320 million people above the $2 a day poverty line. This could be achieved by 2015, the year set by the United Nations for achieving what were designated as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by world leaders during their 2000 millennium summit held in New York. The Bank’s estimate was vindicated by William Cline, a highly respected economist who had worked in several think-tanks in Washington DC. In Trade Policy and Global Poverty, a widely read book among the policy circles in the United States, Cline reached a higher figure — 440 million — of the number of people who would be helped by free trade, in particular free trade between poor and rich nations.

While the principles on which the Doha round was to proceed were supported by theory, politics had its own goals. Most developed countries found it difficult to overcome the opposition of the small number of people in their countries who would have been temporarily hurt by the removal of farm subsidies. Also opposed to the easing of some of the constraints were the influential pharmaceutical companies who were not prepared to lose their patents and reduce the price of their drugs even if it meant not delivering relief to the poor people facing certain death from such communicable diseases as Aids.

For these reasons, as the ministers planned their trip to Hong Kong, there was not a great deal of hope for success. Pascal Lamy, the new director-general of WTO, feared that the Hong Kong meeting could result in a total impasse unless ministers from the developed countries were prepared to make some commitments that would meet the goals of the Doha round when it was initially launched.

Pakistan did not go to Hong Kong with a great deal of hope. Humayun Akhtar Khan, its energetic and knowledgeable commerce minister, had carved out a good space for himself as a designated negotiator for G-20, a group of large and influential developing countries who by virtue of their size carry considerable weight in international trade matters. The group had worked hard to develop a common position which would have positive consequences for its members.

Non-agricultural market access (NAMA) was the area of greatest interest to this group of countries. But in pursuing this line, the G-20 faced two conflicting interests. There was the interest of countries such as Brazil, the world’s most efficient producer of agricultural products, to gain an even playing field in trade in agriculture, undistorted by subsidies and other forms of state assistance. If this were to happen, large agriculture exporting countries such as Brazil would most certainly benefit while countries such as Pakistan that had begun to rely on importing commodities such as cotton for providing inputs to a rapidly growing industry would pay a higher price for the needed raw materials.

There was one other contentious issue the G-20 had to deal with. This concerned the willingness of the developed world to permit duty-free imports of textile and clothing from the least developed countries while levying heavy tariffs from the producers in the relatively more developed developing countries that included Pakistan. How to reconcile these opposing interests? How to ensure that the evolving global trading system moved forward even after the shaky push received at Hong Kong and that it would bring benefits to Pakistan which is only now, nearly 60 years after becoming a state, beginning to draw developmental benefit from international trade?

I will answer these questions next week when I will look more closely at the outcome of Hong Kong and its likely consequences for Pakistan.

Intelligence abuse deja vu

THREE weeks after I took the oath of office in the Senate in 1975, the then majority leader Mike Mansfield appointed me to a newly created committee — the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, which soon came to be known as the “Church Committee,” after its chairman, the late Sen. Frank Church of Idaho. Out of 11 members, I was by far the youngest.

The Senate had impanelled the committee because of increasing reports of abuse of authority by the country’s myriad intelligence agencies under the Nixon administration as well as previous administrations. For two years, the committee investigated broadly — the CIA, FBI, DIA and NSA were all within its purview — and finally, in 1976, it issued a series of recommendations designed to prevent future abuses.

Today, one has only to consider the behaviour of the Bush administration during the Iraq war to appreciate how soon we forget, how little we learn and how pervasive is the tendency to violate civil and constitutional liberties in the name of war. Virtually all of the reforms recommended by the Church Committee — many of which were passed into law — have been evaded, ignored or violated in the name of the “war on terrorism.”

It is often said that the first victim of war is the truth. In fact, the first victim of American war is the liberty of Americans.

During our investigations of intelligence abuse, we discovered that the government had engaged in widespread surveillance of a very large number of American citizens. Civil rights leaders were monitored. Antiwar groups were under surveillance. Domestic phones were tapped. Mail was opened. The FBI conducted warrantless “black bag” break-ins of private residences and offices. We wrote an entire report on warrantless electronic surveillance by the FBI - exactly what the NSA has now been authorized to do by the president.

One particularly egregious programme, code-named COINTELPRO, went beyond the mere collection of intelligence on domestic groups to actually trying to “disrupt” or “neutralize” target groups. The excuse given by the FBI and others was, “We are at war, and we need to do everything we can to defeat our enemy.” Sound familiar?

In some cases, the intelligence services even turned violent. The CIA, for instance, conducted the infamous Phoenix programme that resulted in the systematic assassination of thousands of Vietnamese villagers accused of collaborating with the Viet Cong. This was the 1970s version of Abu Ghraib. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations we tried (with obsessive insistence in the case of Fidel Castro) to assassinate at least six foreign leaders. Too bad we didn’t have the Predator then. It would have been much simpler.

Our committee’s work resulted in many reforms. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required special intelligence courts to approve national security wiretaps. The Bush administration, however, has found that statute inconvenient and, predictably, has ignored it.

Our committee also recommended presidential “findings” before extraordinary covert operations were undertaken. This was not designed to undermine the CIA but to protect it; until then it had been left dangling in the wind when misused by presidents who wished to claim “plausible deniability.”

That reform surfaced during another period of political abuse — the infamous Iran-Contra affair, involving Bible-shaped cakes, trading with the enemy, lying to Congress and avoidance of accountability. It turns out that President Reagan, contrary to his own memory, had signed a “finding” authorizing the whole bizarre episode.

Again to support the CIA, our panel laid the groundwork for the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act that prevented identification of CIA operatives. This was the act that now appears to have been violated by at least half of the Bush White House in its demented efforts to punish Ambassador Joe Wilson by “outing” his undercover wife.

So what goes around, comes around. Here we are again, 30 years later, in yet another unwise war, no wiser and once again willing to sacrifice constitutional liberties for security expediency. If there was one lesson all of us who served on the Church Committee learned, it was that there are no secrets, that everything comes out and that the sacrifice of liberty is almost never justified by improved security.

If the US is to prevail, it must grow up. It must learn from its mistakes, and not repeat them. It must finally understand that our security cannot be ensured by sacrifice of our own liberties.

The writer is a former Democratic senator and the author of “The Shield and the Cloak,” to be published in February.

As the issue spirals out of control

THIS has been a bad week for the president. He has suddenly discovered, for the first time in his six-year rule, that in his hard-sell campaign on the Kalabagh Dam he has hit a major hidden reef that will take considerably more than negotiation and dialogue to wash away.

This is because the perception in Sindh is that the Kalabagh Dam project will be excessively harmful for the people of the province. The importance of the issue can be gauged by the fact that the proposed construction of the dam has been hotly contested by Sindhi politicians of all shades and persuasions, both in the government and in the opposition.

The campaign started much earlier and the ground had been ably prepared by Information Minister Sheikh Rashid for whom no subject is too grisly or rusty to tackle. In a couple of television broadsides he delivered what sounded rather like a third-party stream of whimsy, where everything was dropped into parentheses and inverted commas. The gist of his argument was that Pakistan is desperately in need of reservoirs of water. Therefore, the construction of the Kalabagh Dam was absolutely imperative.

The problem with Sheikh Rashid is that he speaks on so many subjects in his two-stroke voice that at times he sounds awfully tongue-in-cheek. Besides, he hangs on to the old grey cathode tube for far too long. Fortunately for him, he left the unpleasant bits to his master, who has no hesitation in calling a spade a spade or in telling the Sindhis that in refusing to cooperate in the construction of the dam they were collectively committing suicide.

The perception in this province where everybody is complaining about the shortage of water is that the Indus river is not producing as much of the precious liquid as it used to, and if the lads up in the north started to divert some of that source there would be that much less water in the south.

People in Sindh who have a deep-seated distrust of the motives of the centre, are very touchy about what others propose to do to the river whose ebb and flow is the very pulse of their province, and remember with bitterness how farmers have been forced to chop down orchards of mango trees. The sheet of water that has become a bone of contention originates in the 16,000 feet high glaciers of the northern slopes of Kailash Parbat in Tibet, starts as a mere trickle, collects water produced by rain and melting snows from an area spreading across 940,000 square kilometres, is amplified by the waters of 10 other rivers to become one of the longest rivers of the world, passes through 500 kilometres of Sindh and finally ends up in the salty vastness of the Arabian Sea.

The reaction of the local politicians was predictable. Makhdoom Amin Fahim said the dam was a dead issue which had been rejected by three federating units and declared that there was no question of discussing the issue with the government. He said his party would not support anything that was against the integrity of Pakistan. Another politician stated that, like Kashmir, the issue of the dam was usually raised as a diversion, whenever the government realized it had lost the confidence of the nation, and that all that the president really wanted to do was ensure the support of the majority province so that he could perpetuate his hold on power.

A third, who is known for his wry sense of humour, said surely every province had an inalienable right to commit suicide, and when the last rites have been completed President Musharraf could always turn around and say to the political opinion moulders in Sindh: ‘Didn’t I tell you this would happen ?’

Readers as a rule dislike cold statistics, but there are times when it is necessary to throw in a few. A glimpse at the records, however, indicates that there is no way of knowing just how much water will be available in the rivers in the years to come. All one can really do is study past trends and assume that a similar pattern will be followed in the future.

Fortunately, thanks to the British, records of river flows are available since 1922. A study of these documents indicates that the flow pattern of our rivers has been highly erratic. For example, the highest annual flow in a 72-year period, from 1922 to 1994, occurred in 1959-1960 when 186.79 MAF was recorded. The lowest figure was entered in 1974-1975 when statisticians came up with the figure 97.74 MAF, registering an annual average of 138.69 MAF. The 83.6 per cent of this was in Kharif and 16.4 per cent in Rabi. There has also been a drought cycle stretching across nine continuous years from 1924-25 to 1932-33, when the river flows were below the recorded average.

To make matters worse, Wapda has not only made a number of incorrect assumptions, but also deviated from its own position from time to time. In fact, the criterion employed to determine the availability of water worked out on the basis of four out of five years, by Wapda officials in 1987 and re-confirmed by former President Farooq Ahmed Khan Leghari when he was minister for water and power in 1990, has been arbitrarily ignored.

When one is armed with such statistics it is necessary to adopt a cautious approach when undertaking any scheme for the construction of a high dam. But after listening to what Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz had to say in his recent press conference, it looks like the government will carry on regardless and all these speeches and exhortations by the president were really an exercise in futility. “All efforts were being made to create a consensus,” said the prime minister last Friday after attending a Christmas celebration, “but if this was not possible, the majority’s opinion will prevail in the interest of the country.”

The implication here is that the only people who appear to know what is good for Karachi and the rest of the country are the mandarins living in Islamabad.

These are the people who have decided that it would be in the supreme national interest to reverse their earlier decision and go ahead with the purchase of shiny new VVIP aircraft and the AWACs.

They are also the people who have decided that after involving during the last four years numerous delegations of Chinese and Japanese engineers, local town planners, the former nazim of Karachi, the governor, the chief minister of Sindh, the minister of railways and lesser functionaries in endless meetings, discussions, and sophisticated presentations which ended in a number of MOUs, it was in the supreme national interest that the Karachi Circular railway scheme should be put off for another two years and that what Karachi really needs is another dozen flyovers and another 200 buses. Who can question such wisdom?

Remembering the tsunami

THE day after the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated Lisbon in 1755, killing perhaps 100,000 people, the Portuguese prime minister Sebastico de Melo considered the ruins of one of Europe’s great cities.

“What now?” he declared. “Bury the dead and feed the living.” De Melo’s formidable energy helped avert disaster from famine and disease. In turn, his reforms laid the foundations for Lisbon’s revival. Its legacy can be seen in the pioneering quake-proof buildings and squares of the capital’s rebuilt centre, dubbed Pombaline after de Melo’s title as Marquis of Pombal.

The spirit of de Melo has been sorely needed in south-east Asia in the last 12 months, following the cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami that dwarfed even the disaster of Lisbon. In a year studded with natural disasters — including the terrible earthquake in Kashmir, and hurricanes Katrina and Ruth — the tsunami of December 26 remains in a league of its own.

Viewers around the world watched in horror as the events of Boxing Day unfolded on their television screens. The scale of the devastation was unimaginable — except that imagination was not required, as the veracity of tourist video supplied any gaps. As a result, the tsunami unleashed a wave of its own: an unprecedented response from the rest of the world.

As hearts were touched, wallets and purses were opened and funds flowed. Aid agencies were in the unusual position of closing appeals. To take one example, a report this month by Oxfam revealed that its tsunami fundraising effort alone was the largest in its history — a total of 188 million pounds, with 90 per cent given directly by the public.

A huge international effort quickly got underway to tackle de Melo’s primary objectives, burying the dead and feeding the living. But despite the billions pledged, difficulties soon emerged. There were tragic farces of inappropriate aid — containers of ski jackets sent to tropical Sri Lanka, crates of Viagra delivered as medical supplies.

But the sheer scale of the tragedy meant that victims were spread far and wide, hard to find and difficult to help. Even after the initial emergency had passed, the hard slog of rebuilding shattered towns and communities has proved to be more difficult than gathering the donations.

Organizations such as the Red Cross and UN agencies have been forced to make difficult decisions given the physical resources — people and equipment, rather than funds — available. Oxfam, for example, spent 73 million pounds on tsunami relief this year, with 56 million pounds planned for 2006, and the rest spread over the following two years.

The pace of the reconstruction has brought complaints, some well founded, others not. Those looking for counter-examples should consider two illustrations. The first is the impact of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana and Mississippi, where US authorities struggled in the immediate aftermath and in post-disaster reconstruction. Then there is the earlier example of the 1995 earthquake that destroyed Kobe.

—The Guardian, London