The article, Reprinted from United Nations Africa Renewal, www.un.org/AR. asks whether World Trade Organization’s Doha process, labelled as a ‘development" round, can really deliver benefits for Africa. It will be of interest to your readers since what happens at the WTO has an impact on your country.

The suspension of global trade talks at the World Trade Organization in July amid bitter disagreements over reform of trade in agriculture was decried as a major setback for Africa. WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy called the failure "a crisis situation."

The talks which began in 2001 in Doha, Qatar, were dubbed a "development round" for their emphasis on poverty reduction in developing countries.

However, after four years of meetings and consultations, many developing countries – and a growing number of Northern economists - believe that key parts of the development agenda have been shunted to the back burner anyway.

The mounting scepticism of the South was expressed by African trade ministers meeting in Arusha, Tanzania, last November. They denounced the negotiations for "failure to deliver any tangible results on development issues, despite the characterization of the work programme as a development round."

Overall, asserted Mr. Tetteh Hormeku of the Third World Network, freeing up global trade "has not been beneficial to African economies. We are on the receiving end of the global economy, which is repatriating our resources and locking in IMF and World Bank conditions through trade agreements.… What we have at the moment is … that African countries should open up … their economy to foreign providers in a way that destroys domestic production and jobs. It can never lead an African country out of poverty."

Surprisingly, a growing number of Northern economists have joined the African critique of trade liberalisation, including Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who notes, "Many of the issues that it has addressed should never have been on the agenda of a genuine development round, and many issues that should have been on the agenda are not."

The decision to label the Doha process a "development" round reflected the new assertiveness of poor countries at the WTO. The trade group’s 1999 conference in Seattle ended in failure partly because developing countries, led by Africa, refused to launch talks on new issues until inequities in the previous trade agreement, known as the Uruguay Round, were fixed.

In order to start a new round of new talks, developed countries needed to include a number of "development" issues of concern to Africa. These included correcting the inequities of previous trade agreements and eliminating Northern agricultural subsidies (about $350 bn annually), which depress world prices and create unfair competition for unsubsidized African produce.

Industrial nations also promised to show flexibility in how poor countries are permitted to adjust to WTO agreements, to improve access by poor countries to consumers in rich countries and to expand "aid for trade" to help them produce more for export.

The sceptics’ arguments have been strengthened by the failure of the global trading system to deliver prosperity and economic development for the African poor. New research by the World Bank has led some economists to conclude that Africa may have failed to reap the promised benefits of free trade because they were never really there.

In 2003, a study by the World Bank predicted that successful completion of the Doha talks would generate a staggering $832 bn of new wealth by 2015, with most of that, $539 bn, going to developing countries — enough to lift 144 million people out of poverty. The figures were widely cited by trade negotiators, journalists, anti-poverty advocates and senior UN officials in urging poor countries to liberalise quickly.

More recent research, however, casts grave doubts on these estimates and raises new questions about the value of trade liberalisation as a development tool for poor countries. Late last year, the World Bank reported that Doha would give only $96 bn in total gains — with $80 bn going to the industrialised North and just $16 bn to the developing South.

This means that Doha would increase the average income of each citizen in a developing country by less than one US cent per day and reduce the global poverty rate by less than half a per cent. "Hardly a good advertisement for this so-called ‘development round’ of global trade talks," researchers observed.

The failure of trade liberalisation to deliver on its development promises is leading a growing number of economists to question whether it helps or hurts the poor. Dr. Thomas Palley, an economist at Yale University, wrote in early 2006: "Mainstream policy economics has been gradually lowering its claims about the positive impact of trade on development and poverty reduction.… A decade ago, mainstream policy economics argued vigorously that trade promotes development. If this were true, given the massive increase in global trade over the last 25 years, the global economy ought to have experienced accelerated growth. Instead, growth has actually slowed compared with the previous 25 years."

Dr. Palley argued that while growth is necessary to reduce poverty in developing countries, it is not sufficient. The claim that increased trade automatically reduces poverty "is belied by the increasing income ratio of North to South …"

Arguing that poor countries should consider abandoning free-trade development models in favour of protecting and developing their domestic markets, Dr. Palley cited recent research to conclude that expanded trade is a result of development, rather than a cause of development.