Gordon McLauchlan: WTO long dead but won't lie down

COMMENT

Hands up those over the age of 21 smart enough to spell their own names, tie their own shoelaces and find their way to and from the toilet when necessary who would have confidently bet a dollar on the World Trade Organisation achieving any sort of practical agreement on agricultural tariffs last week.

If your hand is in the air you need help.

As the New Zealand representatives crawled home from the WTO meeting in Cancun this week, allegedly exhausted from gab-festing, the commentaries started, prompting the unsettling feeling that I had heard it all before. And, of course, I had.

Why do negotiators bother trudging off to some remote city to brave the brawling anti-globalisation protesters when an analysis of the various national interests reveals that only a disaster as big as a World War III or - even more unlikely - spontaneous altruism by rich nations could possibly break the deadlock on agricultural trade?

I guess it's a bit like going to church: no rational evidence exists that staying on your knees praying for hours at a time will help you get to another, better world but it's worth a shot. I'm not saying that the impulse for altruism is entirely absent in the developed world but how do you effect it? Think of all the cotton growers and dairy farmers in the United States.

A senator goes along to a meeting one day and says, "Look, we're going to give the Kiwis a break and drop tariffs on dairy products. It means you're out of business and this town will be in trouble but I'm sure you'll understand we need to be fair. In fact, we are going to withdraw the billions of dollars with which we prop you guys up every year so that Kiwi dairy farmers, South American cattle ranchers, Indian cotton growers and African peanut planters, among others, can get a fair suck of the sav."

"Sure, sure, we understand," they chorus?

Fat chance.

Do they applaud? No, they throw eggs at him. And so would you in their position.

Have you noticed what French and Irish farmers do when anyone threatens their agricultural subsidies? They don't just drive a tractor up the steps of Parliament Buildings, they send herds of cattle and flocks of sheep into the cities and block main streets with animals, trucks and tractors. Bulls make the pavements slippery with the stuff political alchemists change into language.

It was in the 1980s when a North Dakota farmer (aka a voter) told me what was then a joke and has become a cliche: "We don't farm the land, we farm the Government." Last year I dropped in on a dairy farmer in Iowa, also a voter every two years - terrific bloke, excellent farmer who knows his business but would simply disappear without subsidies.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was born in Geneva in 1947 to promote trade between nations, especially by negotiating lower tariffs. It made some small progress in uncontroversial areas for a few years - at the same time as developed countries were introducing agricultural subsidies, a reason for which was given as national security.

In the nervous postwar years they wanted to be self-sufficient in food. Countries such as Japan were understandably shielding the economies they were rebuilding from the ground up. In 1963 Gatt's Kennedy Round began and four years later those of us holding our breaths went blue and the round ended.

Then in 1979 came the Tokyo Round, which no one can remember but which more or less defined the intractable positions held by all parties. Only hope remained.

A wise government "can hold men's hearts by hopes when it cannot by satisfaction", wrote Francis Bacon, an Elizabethan who knew a thing or two. An old Waikato proverb is: "Hope is what grows when the grass doesn't."

The Uruguay Round, started in 1986, was buoyed by lots of hype but by 1993 we understood the whole idea that the US and Europe would allow free agricultural trade was a bad joke. (They are called rounds, by the way, because they finish where they start.)

The politicians then did what they always do when an institution is seen to be ineffective - they changed its name and pretended to begin again. General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade had become self-evidently absurd, so they killed it and reincarnated it as the World Trade Organisation. Here they had a name which promised nothing for an organisation that has delivered nothing. Unless you consider giving Mike Moore a retirement job in Geneva for a few years something.

So how is it we get these great expectations every few years that something will come of this organisation?

My theory is that belief in a possible solution develops with each new generation of negotiators. Their ebullient self-belief goes hand in hand with their state of denial. And commentators go along in all their splendid naivety, and afterwards breathe such words as I read this week: "Agriculture was, however, always going to be the make or break of the Cancun meeting." Oh, really?

And my favourite quote: "The collapse of the talks at Cancun is ... a lost opportunity, but as in previous trade negotiations (most notably, the Uruguay Round), this setback is unlikely to be fatal."

Believe me, it's dead, has been for years but it won't lie down - unlike the Third World poor. Maybe it's time to change the name again.