Cultural Diversity and the WTO Doha Development Agenda
Report
from the Cancún Ministerial Meeting
Garry Neil
INCD Coordinator
17 September 2003
The Fifth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade
Organization, held in Cancún Mexico from 10-14 September 2003, was adjourned
without agreement on a Final Declaration.
The failure of the meeting is a significant blow to the WTO and
virtually assures that a comprehensive trade deal will not be completed by the
original deadline of January 2005. For
those concerned about promoting cultural diversity in the face of
globalization, the collapse of the meeting brings some good news. However, significant challenges remain on a
number of related fronts.
The INCD was represented at the Cancún meetings by Garry
Neil, INCD Coordinator; Steven Shrybman, trade lawyer and author of INCD’s
draft Convention on Cultural Diversity; Rafael Segovia, Mexican representative
on the INCD Steering Committee; and Angélica Aragón, distinguished Mexican
actor and representative of the signatories to the INCD Artists Letter.
In addition, several other INCD members were in Cancún,
including ARD, the association of German public service broadcasters,
Eurocinema, representing the French film industry and the European Broadcasting
Union. All the INCD members worked
together in an effort to raise the cultural diversity issues and exchanged
information and intelligence about the ministerial session and the potential
implications of the draft texts for cultural policies.
INCD delegates were active both within the official WTO
events, at the NGO Centre, and outside at the alternative civil society
meetings and public demonstrations.
The INCD used the opportunity of the WTO Ministerial meeting
to publicly present the Artists Letter.
Since one of the letter’s demands is for negotiators to refrain from
trading away culture in the trade talks, Aragón was in Cancún to release it on
behalf of the 40 initial signatories.
Aragón is a major star, with a lead role in a daily soap opera, and it
was valuable to have her on the team.
Two examples highlight the impact of her status. At the registration centre, she was
initially denied official status, since the INCD had already registered the
maximum number of delegates. On hearing
that Aragón wished to register, the head of the Mexican NGO liaison committee
immediately instructed officials to provide a badge. Thus, the INCD was the only NGO to have four official delegates
to the WTO meeting. Later, the taxi
carrying her and Rafael to a cultural diversity dinner was stopped at a police
roadblock. The road was closed in both
directions because of a demonstration outside the Convention Centre. When a senior police official learned of the
problem, he provided a police escort and directed their taxi the wrong way on a
one-way street, so that she could get to the dinner.
The principal activities took place on Friday September 12,
and were co-sponsored by the INCD, ARD, the German Culture Council and the
Heinrich Böll Foundation. The Böll
Foundation, associated with the German Green Party, sponsored four days of
public meetings on various issues, including water, environment, food safety
and cultural diversity.
The cultural diversity day began with a breakfast briefing
for press, where 15 journalists heard analyses from Garry Neil, Fritz Pleitgen
of ARD and Max Fuchs of the German Culture Council.
The mid-day Public Forum, held outside the security
perimeter, attracted 100 people, a significant number given security
arrangements that required registered delegates to travel more than 50
kilometres out of their way to reach downtown.
Attendees included government delegates, registered NGOs, activists,
farmers and Mexican citizens. The
co-sponsoring organizations released a Cancún Declaration on Cultural
Diversity. The Forum heard Steven
Shrybman describe how trade liberalization, both in theory and in practice, is
a threat to cultural diversity. Aragón
explain why she signed the Artists Letter and afterwards was besieged by fans
and Mexican media.
The day concluded with an informal cultural diversity dinner
also sponsored by the Böll Foundation.
Unfortunately, because of the growing pressures of the official meetings
and the road closure, many WTO officials and delegates scheduled to attend were
unable to get to the venue. But, there
was a lively discussion, generated by the keynote address delivered by
Eurocinema’s Yvon Thiéc, who is also an INCD Steering Committee member, and the
response from Bonnie Richardson, Vice-President of the Motion Picture
Association in Washington. Not
surprisingly, there was no agreement on the basic issues.
During the Cancún events, INCD delegates held meetings with
trade officials, representatives of the INCP, other civil society movements and
among cultural diversity activists.
Aragón spoke at the Closing Ceremony of the People’s Summit on 15
September 2003, held in Cancún’s main square.
There
was virtually no discussion of the cultural diversity issues at the official
WTO meetings. Agricultural subsidies
and export supports, market access for non-agricultural products,
implementation of Uruguay-round commitments, special and differential treatment
and the Singapore issues were the topics of debate. There was an effort in the parallel forum of parliamentarians to
draft language on the need to respect and promote cultural diversity, but the
group released no final declaration.
However,
policies and measures that promote cultural diversity continue to be at risk in
the World Trade Organization’s pursuit of trade liberalization.
Singapore
Issues
The
Ministerial meeting collapsed because of a failure to agree on launching
negotiations on the so-called Singapore issues, investment, competition policy,
transparency in government procurement and trade facilitation. This is good news for cultural diversity,
since discussions on trade and investment and trade and competition policy
could bring significant restrictions on government cultural measures. Many countries limit or control foreign
investments in cultural industries and others use competition policy to promote
local artists and cultural producers in the face of domination by giant
international media conglomerates.
Should negotiations be launched in these areas, there will be pressure
on cultural policies, as there was during the OECD negotiations for a possible
Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
However,
the failure to agree on launching the negotiations does not mean this is the
end of the story. Discussions are
expected to resume in Geneva, and it is clear that a number of Western nations
are anxious to open formal negotiations in these areas, and see this as a
fundamental part of a final trade-off for a deal on agriculture.
TRIPS
The
INCD has been monitoring the discussions about WTO’s intellectual property
treaty and there was one disturbing development. Negotiators agreed to conclude in 2004 consideration of the
“modalities” for resolving non-violation complaints under the TRIPS. A non-violation complaint is one that
alleges that a measure maintained by another country, while not technically a
violation of the agreement, nonetheless impairs the benefits that member could
reasonably expect to receive under its terms.
Given that TRIPS includes copyright protection, there is a danger that
non-violation complaints could be launched against cultural measures. With agreement on the timetable to finalize
this issue, it is likely the moratorium on non-violation complaints, in place
since the TRIPS came into effect, will expire in 2004.
GATS
The
most significant developments for cultural diversity concern the General
Agreement on Trade in Services.
Negotiations on GATS are proceeding independently of the Doha Round
since they were mandated in the Uruguay agreement. Thus, the request/offer process will continue and countries have
been urged to improve their offers.
Fully half of the requests received by the European Union concerned
audiovisual and other cultural services, so pressure will continue in this
forum.
Also,
the WTO announced that negotiations are underway on the development of
“possible disciplines that are not yet included in GATS: rules on ...
government procurement, and subsidies.”
While
GATS is a “bottom-up” agreement that generally applies only to those services
that an individual government decides to commit, there are certain provisions
in the agreement (horizontal provisions) that apply to all services, whether a
commitment has been made or not. Many
countries subsidize film and television producers, artists and other cultural
service “suppliers”, and many public service broadcasters maintain procurement
policies that give preference to domestic suppliers. To the extent that negotiators consider the possibility of
“horizontal” rules covering subsidies and government procurement in GATS, these
measures and others could be threatened.
The
other new development concerning the GATS arises from one of the existing
“horizontal” provisions. The GATS Most
Favoured Nation article obligates a member to provide to all foreign nationals
the best treatment it provides to any other foreign national. Many countries maintain bilateral
co-production treaties which encourage partnerships between film and television
producers in the two countries by treating the foreign producer equally to the
national producer. Since such
arrangements are not extended to nationals from non-treaty countries they
violate the MFN principle. Thus,
countries that maintain such treaties were required to list them as
“exemptions” under the GATS when it came into force in 1995. Theoretically, these exemptions were to
expire in ten years time, although there has been no indication that
continuation of the exemptions was at risk.
However, the WTO briefing notes released in Cancún state “all exemptions
are currently being reviewed, to examine whether the conditions which created
the need for these exemptions still exist.”
The
Task Ahead
Clearly,
cultural diversity activists will need to continue to monitor developments at
the World Trade Organization carefully, despite the failure of the Ministerial
meeting.
In
addition to WTO, the INCD and others will need to monitor the regional and
bilateral trade negotiations more closely.
One of the ways in which the United States may respond to the failure in
Cancún will be to put even more emphasis on the bilateral negotiating
process. The economic strength of the
U.S. is not counterbalanced by other countries or blocks in the bilateral forum
and there is an increased risk that other countries will bend to direct U.S.
pressure on cultural policies. In the
months to come, we will need to look carefully at developments in the
negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the U.S./Australia
negotiations, and the U.S. proposal to launch talks with countries in Central
America and the Southern African Customs Union.