False Economy - Alan Beattie [149]
And yet even nine days of sweat-soaked, adrenaline-fueled talks that often ran far into the night in the WTO's modest building on the shores of Lake Geneva could not get them finished. In truth, this was not entirely surprising, since the talks had similarly broken down in acrimony at about the same point the previous two years. Along with beach holidays, backyard barbecues, and Wimbledon, the collapse of the Doha round was threatening to become a summer ritual.
There were plenty of reasons why countries could not agree and why it took so long to work it out. With dozens of ministers present, nations' interests clashed and intersected in multiple dimensions. But several of the most prominent disputes showed that the trade ministers turning up at Geneva in the first decade of the third millennium, with the global economy having entered an "information age" that was supposed to revolutionize the whole basis of human endeavor and wealth, were still trapped in the snares with which economic history had bound them for decades. The Geneva talks of July 2008 became the sum of their fears.
The U.S. representatives came burdened with the weight of the agricultural lobby, and most particularly the cotton farmers. We have seen how American cotton interests manage to wield a political cudgel whose size is way out of proportion to their importance in the American economy. Cotton is one of the few crops that substantially fit the arguments made by development charities that Western agricultural subsidies substantially hurt the livelihoods of some of the poorest farmers in the world. Eleven million people grow cotton in West Africa, all of them in desperately poor countries with few other options.
The situation has a piercing historical irony. The cotton growers in Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Chad are those whose ancestors were lucky enough to have escaped the slave traders that took captured Africans and shipped them across the Atlantic to work in the cotton fields of the Americas. But these days they are hurt by the hugely subsidized cotton grown by white farmers in the southern states of the United States and dumped on the world market.
Because of their particular plight, cotton was supposed to be given "expeditious" and "specific" attention in the Doha round. But the U.S. delegation, with its cotton-growing states continually watching over its shoulder, refused point-blank to discuss the issue separately until an overall deal on cutting farm subsidies and tariffs had been agreed. In fact, when the talks collapsed, one conspiracy theory floating around Geneva held that the United States had demanded concessions in other parts of the talks that it was never likely to get, as a ruse to avoid having to reform its cotton program.
This is likely an exaggeration. But what was patently obvious was the ability of the U.S. farm lobby to block any deal they were not happy with. The sticking point on which the talks unraveled involved demands by the United States that its farmers be guaranteed access to the markets of the big emerging market countries like India and China. Without that, they could not deal. American farmers would not accept cuts to their subsidies without getting more access to export markets. Seventeenth-century mercantilism was alive and well.
No matter that reform would relieve America's taxpayers of some of the burden of shelling out for farm subsidies. No matter that a failed deal would keep other U.S. industries—which employ many more people than agriculture—from getting more access to export markets. No farmers, no agreement. The future of the global trading system was held ransom by a sector that produces less than 1 percent of the country's national income and employs less than 2 percent of its workforce.
But the United States was not alone. The European Union had its own truculent farmers to deal with, who actually get much more support from subsidies and import tariffs than do their American counterparts. The EU also had to cope with the long-running issue of bananas, which we