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| TRADE TROUBLE | |
 November 30, 1999 
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MARGARET WARNER: Joining us from Seattle for an update on the WTO meeting is David Sanger, economic correspondent for the New York Times. Well, David, is it as wild out there as the television footage suggests? |
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| "Old Think" and "New Think" | ||||||||||||||||||||
 DAVID
SANGER, The New York Times: Well, it's pretty wild, Margaret. The demonstrations
started early this morning, and they succeeded in delaying, really canceling,
the morning sessions of the meeting, because the American delegation was
holed up in its hotel and couldn't get out, and the Europeans were holed
up across town in their hotel, and the result is a significant amount
of disruption. I'm not sure what that will add up to by the time this
is all over, but certainly for the day, the demonstrators got their point
across.
MARGARET WARNER: This certainly isn't your typical international trade ministerial, of which you've attended many. How did this one become such a flash point? DAVID SANGER: Well, it's an interesting question, Margaret. Five years ago when the WTO started, it was hard to get a group of reporters to something like this, much less a group of demonstrators.
Whereas the WTO itself, of course, was created not to deal with those issues, but just to promote free trade and lower barriers. So what they're trying to do here, what you're seeing happen on the streets, is a conflict between the old-think about trade, which is that it's a fairly narrow set of economic issues, and the new-think, which is it is related to all of these other questions. And on that, you see both countries and companies dividing. MARGARET WARNER: Now, the trade negotiators, the sort of pre-meeting negotiators in Geneva last week, weren't even able to come up with a formal agenda. Was that because of, to use your phrase, the old-think considerations or the new-think considerations or both? DAVID SANGER: Well, a little bit of both, Margaret. In Geneva, you had basically a group of trade negotiators and trade bureaucrats who were trying to come up with the agenda that they would then hand to their ministers to get going what is called a trade round. And of course, this would just be the beginning here of a three- or four-year process of negotiating a reduction in barriers. They could not even come to an agreement about what issues should be debated.
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| The hot-button issues | ||||||||||||||||||||
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DAVID SANGER: That's right. The White House sensed that to break this deadlock, you are going to need some political decisions made by political decision makers. So they sent out feelers to the likes of Jacques Chirac in France, to leaders in South Africa, and the Japanese prime minister, Prime Minister Obuchi. All of them said, "Well, you're doing this at the very last moment, and we can't come because of our tight schedules," and I'm sure that probably explained why many of them couldn't come. But also, I think, many of those leaders realized that these have become the hot-button issues inside their countries, and they really did not want to be associated with the start of this negotiating round. MARGARET WARNER: Now, what is the administration's game plan -- I know you've been talking to these people for weeks now about this, for dealing with the hot-button issues that the demonstrators are presenting, that is mostly the labor and environmental issues that they want put on the formal agenda?
The Europeans have come up with an interesting alternative, which is to create a working group that is partly between the WTO and the international labor organization, which is a fairly toothless group, also in Geneva, that until now has issued the regulations on these issues. That seems to have some more appeal to some countries, but there are many countries that don't even want to discuss in that jointly run group. MARGARET WARNER: So briefly before we go, the president today did say he sympathized with the demonstrators, but how far do you think the administration, or does your reporting tell you the administration's really ready to go in trying to push their agenda? DAVID SANGER: The administration would like to push their agenda, and they certainly want to show that they are pushing it, because it is a very important issue for Vice President Gore. Imagine two major democratic constituencies here, labor and the environmentalists, are terribly angry at the administration for its inability and, in their mind, its unwillingness to really push these issues to the center of the stage. I think you'll hear President Clinton talk in very sympathetic terms with the demonstrators and about their issues. Whether that translates into much progress for him on those issues, that seems somewhat doubtful right now. MARGARET WARNER: All right, David. Thanks very much. DAVID SANGER: Thank you, Margaret. |
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I
think that there are two things that have made the WTO a particular
focal point for all of these groups. The first is that it seems as if
it is a symbol of world government to many, because it has a power,
of course, to rule on the international legality of individual countries'
rules about trade and all of the issues that that raises. But I think
the second issue is that trade these days seems far broader than just
the movement of products across borders. It has come to involve the
question of what are the environmental standards of countries that are
shipping those products, how do they treat their workers, and these
are all priorities that the people you see out on the street want to
make an integral part of trade negotiations. 
The
Europeans, of course, don't want to have the issue of their food subsidies
on the table, or at least on the table in a way that they think would
lead to major reductions. The Japanese want to review the American dumping
-- antidumping actions, that is the steps the United States takes to
keep out products it thinks are unfairly low in their prices. The result
of that is that the U.S. and Japan were at loggerheads on these issues.
The developing countries don't want many of these labor issues to come
up because they're afraid the United States and the WTO will be dictating
to them about what the standards should be inside their factories. 
MARGARET
WARNER: And then President Clinton had hoped to get some other world
leaders to join him out there -- what, to help break these impasses
-- but to no avail? 
DAVID
SANGER: Well, the administration's plan for labor was to just try to
get a working group going within the WTO that would just get this subject
discussed for the first time. It's never been discussed within the WTO.
The developing countries led by India have been objecting to this because
they realize it's a slippery slope. As soon as the WTO begins discussing
these issues, then they've been legitimized within the forum of the
World Trade Organization. It's only a matter of time before they become
integrated into the agreements.