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Africa’s Vulnerability In International Trade

August 18, 2004

Despite plethora of United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and World Trade Organization (WTO) resolutions and rounds, and Africa’s attempts to get a fair trade, unforgiving reality dictates that the North, and more so the G8, are not ready to accommodate Africa’s interests.

In the recent Geneva General Council meeting (July 2004), African countries, in particular the cotton producing west African nations, were forced to alter their initial ‘stand-alone basis’ for cotton and include it rather within the agriculture negotiation as a whole. Before Geneva, in an effort to resolve the ‘cotton crisis,’ African Ministers had relentlessly exploited diplomatic avenues in the Least Developed Countries (LDC) meeting in Dakar, African Trade Ministers meeting in Kigali, and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) as well as the G90 meetings in Mauritius. All these meetings took place with a prime agenda to treat cotton as a separate issue and also that Africans enjoy equal partnership status in international trade. Incidentally, African Ministers have had a talk with Bob Zoellick, US Trade Representative, hoping that they will witness a positive outcome from the dialogue in the Geneva meeting.

Benin’s Trade Minister, Fatiou Akplogan, confidently asserted that African Ministers in Geneva would only submit ‘proposal for negotiation’ rather than ‘unequivocal commitment.’ The question, however, remains: whom do African countries negotiate with? In what capacity and footing? To begin with, the unequal trade relations between African countries and the Northern nations is impacted not only by the cynicism of the industrial world, but also it is largely engendered by Africa’s primary commodity produce ( in this case, cotton) vis-à-vis the giant manufacturing technology of the North.

Akplogan further argued that Africans “are not prepared to accept the death of thousands of peasants as price of a deal.” From humanitarian point of view, Akplogan’s position is indeed appealing, but in light of the still prevailing neo-mercantilist trade position of the G8, African nations remain vulnerable.

The ‘thousands of peasants’ mentioned above are the cotton producing farmers. In actual fact, there are ten million cotton farmers in West Africa alone, whose existence could be questionable if the current deadlock in agriculture reform continues. The mercantilist policies of the North and the deadlock, without doubt, negate the UN Millennium Development Goals and indirectly preclude poverty reduction programs of respective African nations.

Some international humanitarian organizations like Oxfam have already anticipated the vulnerability of African farmers and have called on the “WTO agree to a meaningful, pro-development framework…” Phil Bloomer, Head of Oxfam’s International’s Trade Fair had the following to say: “their [the US] aggressive insistence on obtaining maximum access to developing country markets flies in the face of agreement that the poor countries should be allowed to protect vulnerable farmer industries.”

Furthermore, Celine Charveriat, Head of Oxfam International’s Geneva office argued: “the draft released…is unacceptable because it fails to meet the needs of developing countries. Presented as breakthrough, the text on agriculture does little to address the problem of export dumping, instead introducing dangerous loopholes for yet more subsidies from the US.”

Moreover, “after days of closed door negotiations,” says Charveriat, “rich countries have delivered a deeply unbalanced text as a take or leave it option. This puts developing countries in the unfair position having to accept a bad deal or reject and get blamed by the US and the EU for failure.”

Bloomer and Charveriat indeed vindicate Akplogan, but in the end, all humanitarian considerations, though encouraging, could vaporize in thin air unless the EU, US, Canada, Japan, and Australia, who have a major say in the WTO, abandon their neo-mercantilist policies and begin to formulate a new policy that could genuinely promote equal partnership of international trade, notwithstanding the inherent disadvantage in primary commodities of developing countries. That will be the day when major industrialized nations promote ‘equitable development’ and developing nations enjoy ‘sustainable trading system’!