D Ravi Kanth: Celebrating Kamal Nath's exit in the West

A Cabinet reshuffle in New Delhi but celebrations in Geneva! That’s what happened when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced some major changes to his Cabinet for the second term. Getting “rid of the commerce minister, who was widely blamed for scuppering trade talks under the Doha Round in Geneva” figured prominently in The Economist. For liberal socialists like Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organisation, and other western commentators, it was a moment of celebration.

Indeed, a day before Singh announced the changes, Lamy told the General Council, the WTO’s major decision-making body, that it would be interesting to know who India’s next trade minister would be. Perhaps, he had some inkling that Nath would be replaced. So, when it was announced Anand Sharma was the new commerce minister, Geneva was agog with speculation whether India would give up its hardline stance in Doha trade negotiations. Without Nath everything is hunky dory, is the belief of the so-called free trade elite at the WTO and in other western capitals.

Over the years, it is has become a practice to paint Indian trade ministers and their officials and New Delhi’s position as obstructionist and harmful in every round of global trade talks. But if The Economist had based its judgment on what the former European trade commissioner Peter Mandelson said in his blog last year, it would have found it difficult to blame Nath. If anything, Lord Mandelson blamed the former US trade representative Ambassador Susan Schwab for the collapse of the July 2008 meeting. In a similar vein, noted trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati criticised the former USTR for adopting untenable positions on agriculture and market access for industrial goods.

But, in the blinkered weltanschauung of the WTO elite — dominated by the US and EU member-countries — which includes some Indian lackeys, there is no place for genuine trade concerns of the developing countries. They have no idea that over 100,000 farmers committed suicide over the last decade because of some pernicious external trade factors. If developing countries like Benin or Burkina Faso say their cotton farmers are dying because of egregious farm subsidies provided by the world’s sole super power, it is dismissed out of hand. These poor nations are told that the problem is not with the subsidies but with their inefficient marketing network. Often, complaints from developing countries are dismissed on the ground that they would block progress in the onward march of the liberal trade agenda.

However, if some developed countries, particularly the US or the EU, were to raise some anti-competitive demands, these will be justified in no time. Consider, for example, Lamy’s latest slogan of ‘outcome testing’ in market access for agriculture and industrial goods. This is clearly meant to help the US which finds it difficult to deliver as per the developmental mandate contained in the Doha framework agreement of 2004 and the Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration of 2005. The US wants to know in advance whether major emerging countries like China, India, Brazil and South Africa are ready to pay according to its terms. Though it wants others to spell out what they are going to pay, it refuses do the same on issues like cotton subsidies or duty-free and quota-free market access for the poorest countries. But the WTO’s director-general is bending over backwards to justify the one-sided US demand.

Little wonder that from the late Murasoli Maran, who was called a ‘no, no trade minister’ in 2001 because he refused to yield to pressures from the major western countries, to Arun Jaitley and Kamal Nath recently, India’s trade ministers are all painted as spoilsports.

However, the poor countries in Africa and elsewhere look up to India for leadership because their concerns and demands are often ignored without a murmur. And India’s demands come close to their interests. It’s time that the WTO and its western beneficiaries change their world view. More so, after they drowned the world in a whirlpool of problems over the last 10 years!