WTO: Reuters attempts to disqualify Azevedo

Umberto Mazzei

02/05/2013

Opinión

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We all know that Big Press is concentrated to serve global moguls on a global scale. They want to and believe they can make and break reputations, manipulating information and slandering with half-truths. Reuters frequently comments on the affairs of the WTO, because Pascal Lamy, WTO General Director, is on the Board of Directors of its matrix company, the Thomson Reuters Corporation (06/12/2009, ThomsonReuters news).

The latest case is a Reuters dispatch dated 05/01/2013, from Brasilia, which tries to discredit Roberto de Azevedo, the Brazilian candidate that with the largest support reached the final round for the post of Director General of the WTO. Reuters is right in saying that while both candidates are from Latin America, each represents different positions on free trade.

Roberto de Azevedo is a skilled negotiator of consensus, as acknowledged by Reuters, and consensus is the basis of the multilateral process of the WTO and all other international organizations. The Mexican rival, Herminio Blanco, who reached the final round helped by an irregularity committed by European countries during the selection of candidates, represents bilateralism, which is the opposite of multilateralism.

Reuters claims that "the United States, Japan, China, South Korea and other countries protested Brazil's decision to raise tariffs". Reuters manipulates the truth. China, which is Brazil’s main trade partner, did not protest. According to WTO rules, Brazil has the right to raise tariffs to the consolidated limit established in the agreements. So the complaint concerning its applied tariffs did not go further than diplomatic verbiage. But besides, to complain about Brazil's trade policy, even under an arbitrary focus, is completely irrelevant.

At WTO each country continues its trade policy within the limits granted by multilateral agreements. The role of the Director General of WTO is to listen in order to search for convergences and to manage the forum with respect for the different national economic and trade policies. The role of Azevedo as Director General will be just that and he has the prestige, the technical capacity and the experience to do a very good job.

Reuters, in its biased dispatch, assumes that trade openness is an undisputed and generally practiced virtue, something which is completely false. Actually, none of the developed countries practises it in their trade. The most glaring evidence is in agriculture, where protectionism and subsidies in the U.S. and European Union distort international trade. Does the U. S. or the European Union, for example, allow free sugar imports? It is a product in which tropical countries have an absolute advantage and a non perishable input. Or, what about the 600% tariff on rice in Japan? At the WTO it is admitted that countries have the right to be concerned first for the welfare of their citizens.

The latter is what Mr. Blanco ignores, because his broad experience is in signing agreements on openness and submission already prepared by the counterpart. This openness, embodied in NAFTA, uprooted three million Mexican farmers which could not compete with U.S. agricultural subsidies. In NAFTA Mr. Blanco resigned the right, recognized at the WTO, to impose countervailing measures against those subsidized products. Mr. Blanco agreed in NAFTA to clauses on Intellectual Property which prolong pharmaceutical patents beyond the limit agreed in the WTO, with dire consequences for public health of his country. The new Mexican civil war, with 40 000 deaths per year, is part of the social disaster caused by NAFTA, a deal of which Mr. Blanco is so boastful. His presence at the helm of the WTO would be a continuation of the sterile policy of Mr Lamy: to impose a policy that favours international corporations, and would ruin local industry and destabilize employment in all countries, developed and developing, that is the bottom line of neo-liberal doctrine.

Roberto de Azevedo, instead, embodies the vision of a multilateral negotiation policy, as befits the WTO, which should advance in ideological neutrality towards a future based on harmonious and balanced economic development.

Conclusion

Mass media manipulation can influence the laity, but at WTO it is the countries that choose. Today, there are few who are not experts in the policies, objectives and rules of the WTO and all know what they want at the negotiating forum. Only the opacity of the electoral system can stop Azevedo's designation as the right person. The opposite would be the end of the WTO, as a multilateral organization.

Geneva, 02/05/2013

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/75790