INTERNATIONAL NETWORK FOR CULTURAL
DIVERSITY
Newsletter 15
December 2001
The Third Annual Conference of the INCD
will be held in Cape Town, South Africa from October 11-13, 2002. As usual, it
will precede that of the Ministerial network which will be meeting from October
14-16, allowing for continued dialogue between the government and the civil
sector. Planning is going forward for the meetings - more details will be
announced early in the new year. We hope that you will be able to join us in
South Africa.
WTO's New Round of Trade Negotiations:
Doha Development Agenda Threatens
Cultural Diversity
At the recently concluded meeting in Qatar,
the World Trade Organization launched a comprehensive new round of trade
negotiations, covering issues with potentially serious consequences for
cultural policy in many countries.
Failure to include language in the Ministerial Declaration acknowledging
the importance of promoting cultural diversity will be significant as these
critical negotiations commence.
The world's cultural community must
redouble efforts to counter the blind pursuit of a free trade agenda by trade
officials. We must work to support the
initiative for a new global cultural pact and be vigilant of our own trade
officials, as well as the WTO. The
ability of states to encourage and support their own artists and cultural
producers may well be lost in the WTO "Doha Development Agenda."
The International Network for Cultural
Diversity is registered as an NGO for WTO meetings and it was represented at
the Fourth Session of the Ministerial Conference by its coordinator. The Doha meetings were six days of tense
negotiations. Because they had
prevented a new round from being launched in Seattle, delegates from the South,
the developing nations and least developed countries, were bullied and
pressured in Doha to make concessions and agree to a new round. As a result of security concerns and the
undemocratic regime in Qatar, fewer than 100 delegates from public interest
non-governmental organizations were able to attend.
Despite the efforts of some countries to
resist the pressure, and the creative and energetic opposition mounted by the
handful of NGOs in Qatar, the ministers reached a "consensus" on a
Declaration. WTO's Director General
hailed the agreement and declared the upcoming negotiations to be the Doha Development
Agenda. Many felt he had been too long
in the Qatari desert and was seeing a mirage, since the agreement is
antithetical to the needs of the South according to those most active in
development work.
The final Declaration (available at
www.wto.org) is a ten-page document that assumes liberalized trade is positive
for all. It outlines an aggressive work
program for the WTO and contemplates new negotiations in several key areas. The timetable is unrealistic as it directs
negotiations to conclude "not later than 1 January 2005," although
some of the negotiations are not set to begin until after the Fifth Session of
the Ministerial Conference, to be convened in 2003. Previous substantive rounds of negotiations have taken up to a
decade to conclude.
There is reference in the preamble to a
number of key social objectives, including sustainable development, protection
of the environment, public health, core labour standards and protection of
bio-diversity. But, there is no
reference to the importance of promoting and maintaining cultural
diversity. Given the broad scope of the
new round of negotiations, this failure is significant. Even the failed Seattle declaration
contained language on cultural diversity but there was no consideration of such
language in Doha.
As a consequence, in the new round of
talks, when trade negotiators make the final trade-offs to secure the deal, in
what is considered to be a "single undertaking," or a fully
integrated round of negotiations, there is nothing in the official Declaration
that can be used to ensure they will look at the potential consequences of
decisions for global cultural diversity.
The Declaration outlines a revitalized work
program in what has been called the "built-in agenda," the matters
left over from the Uruguay Round that have guided the WTO's work in the past
few years. Under the new work program,
negotiations continue in several key fields.
General Agreement on Trade in Services
(GATS)
Negotiations have already begun on the
basis of agreements reached in Geneva.
Preliminary proposals have been exchanged and there is agreement on
negotiating guidelines. The Doha
Declaration adds that requests for commitments must be exchanged by 30 June
2002 and initial offers by 31 March 2003.
The cultural community has significant concerns about these
negotiations:
· All
forms of artistic expression are services as defined by the GATS. While countries may refrain from making
commitments in these fields under the bottom-up approach to the talks, pressure
can be applied bilaterally and multilaterally to seek such commitments.
· The
US has already tabled a proposal that audiovisual services should be fully
covered by the GATS. Switzerland has
put forward a proposal that, in the words of a senior Swiss negotiator,
attempts "to be a bridge between the US and EU positions." Clearly, this will be a major issue in the
new round, and with more issues in play overall, the chances of a trade-off
increase.
· Proposals
on "horizontal issues" can also be anticipated. These are commitments that apply across all
services, whether or not a country has agreed to include that sector in its
general commitments. This means that
such commitments would apply to audiovisual services, publishing, sound
recording, visual arts, and other forms of expression even if these sectors are
otherwise "exempt" from the disciplines.
Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)
At the Doha meeting, this is one area in
which nations from the developing world were able to make some progress. New language clarifies that the scope of
authority provided by the TRIPS "emergency clause" includes
responding to the public health pandemics, including AIDS, malaria and
tuberculosis. There is also recognition
of the importance of protecting traditional knowledge and folklore.
However, other key matters in TRIPS were
not discussed, including the patenting of life forms and the minimal
protections provided to individual creators.
The cultural community also must consider a potentially serious element
of the ongoing discussions:
· One
of the results of the Seattle debacle was a failure to agree on how
"non-violation complaints" would apply to the TRIPS. With the Doha Declaration, the TRIPS Council
is now set to conclude the "modalities" through which such complaints
can be adjudicated. A
"non-violation complaint" is one in which a member country of the WTO
can file a complaint against a measure maintained by another member that, while
not technically a violation of the TRIPS, nonetheless "impairs" the
benefits the other member would reasonably expect to receive. As a consequence of their ownership of
copyright, multinational firms may well encourage their governments to
challenge national cultural measures because these "impair" the
benefits these firms "can reasonably expect" to enjoy under TRIPS
provisions.
Discussions on electronic commerce may well
touch significant cultural issues. The
US has urged that software be covered completely by the various WTO
disciplines, effectively prohibiting imposition of regulatory measures and
controls. The European Union responded that
the content of some software products is cultural in nature and therefore
should not be included as proposed. The
US can be expected to argue that the transmission of cultural materials across
computer networks is merely e-commerce that should be free of regulations.
One of the key areas of dispute at the Doha
meeting was the debate around the so-called Singapore issues, the new areas of
negotiations demanded by the industrialized nations.
From the perspective of the cultural
community, perhaps the most significant single section of the Doha Declaration
is entitled Relationship Between Trade and Investment. It states, "recognizing the case for a
multilateral framework to secure transparent, stable and predictable conditions
for long-term cross-border investment, particularly foreign direct investment,
… we agree that negotiations will take place after the Fifth Session of the
Ministerial Conference, on the basis of a decision to be taken, by explicit
consensus, at that Session on modalities of negotiations." While the Declaration does state that
negotiations must take account of the "right" of governments to
"regulate in the public interest," this section essentially brings
the dramatic rebirth of the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).
The Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development attempted to implement an investment treaty, but it failed in
the face of significant opposition. The
French government was among those to highlight the negative consequences on
culture of the draft proposal. To the
extent the outcome of the new WTO negotiations on investment approaches the
agreement abandoned by the OECD in 1997, the results could be catastrophic for
culture:
· An
investment agreement could force a re-evaluation of a significant number of
cultural policies, including: prohibitions, limits or restrictions on foreign
ownership in the cultural industries; public service broadcasters and other
public institutions, since these might be perceived as unfair competitors for
private foreign investors; regulations that discriminate against foreign
broadcasting or publishing interests; co-production treaties; even financial
subsidy programs if these discriminate against foreign firms or individuals.
· Should
the agreement include an investor-state dispute settlement system that permits
individual firms to sue foreign governments, the potential for challenges by
multinational firms in the entertainment business would be great.
This is another new issue to be negotiated
after the next Ministerial Session to be held in 2003. While the negotiating agenda in this area is
not yet clear, there are potential consequences for cultural policy:
· Competition
policies are used to counter the dominant position of foreign firms in the
domestic marketplace. More importantly,
with convergence and technological change, these tools could become more
significant in the future. If the
ability to use competition policy as a cultural policy tool is restricted or
compromised by the WTO agreement, an important mechanism to encourage
indigenous artists and producers will be lost.
Government Procurement
While the Declaration states
"negotiations (on government procurement) shall be limited to the
transparency aspects and therefore will not restrict the scope for countries to
give preference to domestic supplies and suppliers," it is useful to
recall that TRIPS began as a simple anti-piracy measure. It is possible to create a scenario in which
practices of the public service broadcasters and other public cultural
institutions could be held to scrutiny under a WTO agreement on government
procurement.
There is agreement to launch negotiations
"aimed at clarifying and improving" agreements on subsidies and
countervailing measures. Significantly,
the negotiations will commence with an examination of "trade distorting
practices." The US maintains that
cultural subsidies and other measures are "trade distorting," and
this may provide an avenue for them to pursue such a claim.
The strategy of the cultural sector to seek
the negotiation of a new global cultural pact has been given added urgency by this
WTO Declaration. Given the scope of the
new round of trade talks, we have only a few years remaining to implement an
agreement that will provide a legal foundation for government measures that
promote cultural diversity and provide an effective buffer for these measures
against potential trade retaliation.
While the news from Doha was negative,
recent news from Paris was more positive.
As a result of the growing pressure from cultural sector representatives
around the world, including the recent Lucerne meeting of the International
Network for Cultural Diversity, UNESCO has gone farther in its Declaration on
Cultural Diversity than many thought possible.
UNESCO's statement (www.unesco.org) is a good foundation for a
declaratory statement, but more significantly, it commits in its work plan, to
"… taking forward notably consideration of the opportunity of an
international legal instrument on cultural diversity."
It is important to build on the cultural
pact initiative and the positive development at UNESCO.
Garry Neil, INCD Coordinator
20 November 2001
Thank you to all of our members who
contacted their trade representatives prior to the Doha Ministerial. INCD
coordinator Garry Neil had the chance to meet with many of them and raised the
issue of culture and trade in Qatar.
The Final Report on the Lucerne Conference
is now available on our web site www.incd.net /Conference 2001.
Please note that the INCD Secretariat will
be closed during the holiday season from Dec 21- Jan 3. We extend to all our
members warm wishes for a safe and happy holiday.
Second International Conference on Cultural
Policy Research
Wellington, New Zealand, 23-26 January 2002
The Cultural Management and Research Centre
and the New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage are organizing the Second
International Conference on Cultural Policy Research, providing a forum for
independent, university-based, government and industry researchers to present
and share in the discussion and evaluation of current cultural policy research
being undertaken internationally. It is the second conference in a continuing
series that began with the successful inaugural conference held in Bergen,
Norway in November 1999.
The organisers wish to attract
contributions to both creative and administrative research in the cultural
field, attaching equal importance to studies that are concerned with
theoretical and conceptual issues, models and frameworks; papers that trace
policy development over time; or research projects designed to evaluate the
outcomes of specific initiatives.
Four themes have been defined for the
conference:
· New
Policy Concepts And Models,
· Institutions,
Access, Education,
· Knowledge,
Heritage And Cultural Continuity, and
· Contemporary
Exotic: Local Cultures In An Age Of Globalisation.
For more information, please contact:
Jacqueline Coats, ICCPR '02 Conference Secretariat, Centre for Continuing Education
Te Whare Pukenga, Victoria University of Wellington, Box 600, Wellington, New
Zealand; tel.: +64-4-463-6558; fax: +64-4-463-6550; e-mail:
iccpr2002@vuw.ac.nz; http://www.vuw.ac.nz/conted/iccpr/
Journeys of Expression: Cultural
Festivals/Events & Tourism
Bonn, Germany, 7-10 February 2002
Organised by the Centre for Tourism and
Cultural Change, Sheffield Hallam University, UK, in association with IFEA
Europe, the conference entitled Journeys of Expression: Cultural
Festivals/Events & Tourism will provide a forum for discussing and debating
key issues surrounding the inter-relationships between cultural
festivals/events and tourism.
The speed of global change has an immediate
impact on our festival and event culture – in the artistic field as well as in
the field of marketing and communication. New trends emerge; geographical,
sensual, technical and cultural borders are crossed; taboos are broken; genres
intermingle. What impact do these changes have on our work, our culture and our
way of life? On which path will art lead us? Does integrity still have a place
in culture, in events? Does artistic culture have a future?
The conference participants will be taken
into a maelstrom of the culture and event business, to investigate the
different demands on those working in the field of culture, to celebrate
success, analyse failure and discover solutions.
Full details can be obtained from:
http://www.ifeaeurope.com
Contact: Maria Nusser-Wagner, e-mail:
nusser-wagner@kah-bonn.de