Regional trade deals threaten poor, WTO - Oxfam
Source: Reuters
By Alistair Thomson DAKAR, March 21 (Reuters) - The United States and the European Union are using bilateral and regional trade deals to force poor countries to make concessions they have resisted in global trade talks, aid campaign group Oxfam said on Wednesday. While deep in negotiations for a World Trade Organisation deal to boost commerce globally, Washington and Brussels are also pushing for regional free trade agreements (FTAs). Oxfam said FTAs threatened to rob poor countries of the right to implement policies which had helped rich states and the "Asian tiger" nations to grow in the past. "Simply to maintain their current access to rich-country markets, developing countries are being asked to liberalise tariffs to an astonishing degree, far beyond anything proposed at the WTO," a 38-page report by the British-based group said. "Rich countries are using bilateral and regional trade and investment agreements to extract concessions they are unable to obtain at the multilateral level, where developing countries can band together and hold out for more favourable rules," it said. Brussels denies it wants to exploit poor countries and says, for example, it is offering 78 nations in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group deals to cut barriers to trade and investment gradually, with transition periods of up to 25 years. Several African trade ministers last week welcomed EU commitments over development issues in the talks, although they asked for more aid to compensate for lost tariff revenues. Regional talks were costly and left poor countries short of negotiators for WTO talks and the growing number of FTAs being signed were diluting the benefits they conferred, Oxfam said. Some 25 developing countries have signed FTAs with developed countries, and more than 100 are involved in talks, Oxfam said. "The U.S. has been able to use its much greater leverage to get a lot of concessions from much smaller and in many cases much poorer countries," said Kimberly Elliott, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank. U.S. trade officials were unavailable for comment. Oxfam said poor countries were being asked to cut their tariffs while rich ones lavished subsidies on farmers. Jobs promised by U.S. free trade agreements with Latin American countries sometimes failed to materialise or were of such low standards they left workers just as badly off, it said. Meanwhile consumers did not always see the benefits of lower prices as foreign firms creamed off profits, Oxfam said. At the same time, detailed agreements on intellectual property limiting access to generic drugs and seed stocks, as well as complex investment regulations, reduced governments' ability to formulate future policy to promote development. "FTAs threaten to strip developing countries of the very policy instruments they need to make investment and trade work for development," Oxfam said. (Additional reporting by Missy Ryan and Ingrid Melander)
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