For the 3 billion people who live on less than $2/day, this month has been fateful. Global leaders negotiated two international agreements with huge implications for the world's poor. One agreement offers hope. The other offers more despair.
Hope emerged from a new plan to expand world trade. Meeting in Doha, Qatar, ministers of 142 countries in the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreed to launch a new round of trade talks-the first since the Uruguay Round of 1986-93.
Renewal of international commitment to trade could not have come at a better time. The worldwide economy is wobbling dangerously. Much of the malaise results from trade doubts unleashed when the WTO's 1999 meeting in Seattle ended in failure.
Seattle impasse
In Seattle, developed countries, especially the US, acted unsure about the benefits of global commerce. With its economy then still booming, the US insisted that negotiations about opening markets include labor conditions and environmental standards. Other countries considered the demands protectionist. Negotiations couldn't resolve the impasse.
From Seattle, therefore, came this economically chilling message: The world's leading economy was willing to sacrifice trade to other political agendas. Former President Bill Clinton amplified the signal with his accommodation of the anti- globalization protestors who vandalized Seattle as WTO met and whose perverse movement gained momentum as a result.
No outcome could have been worse for the world's poor. Refuting a core claim of the antiglobalists, World Bank studies document the economic progress made by developing countries that have liberalized trade. At the Doha meeting, the bank said elimination of remaining barriers to trade in goods might reduce the number of poor people in developing countries by 300 million in 2015.
Trade is vital to economic health, which is ultimately about feeding people. Trade compromisers need that reminder.
So do supporters of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, who claim to have rescued their cause with an agreement on implementation this month in Marrakech, Morocco.
"The Kyoto process is now irreversible," crowed Olivier Deleuze, energy minister of Belgium and the European Union's representative in Marrakech, after negotiators approved compromises to the protocol that made agreement possible.
For the EU, Kyoto's biggest booster, "process" seems to be the goal. EU negotiators want a deal. They seem to care little about substance of the deal and scoff at questions about it. They pay meager attention to climate science and even less to Kyoto's potential damage to the global economy-and, therefore, the world's poor.
Their deal, in fact, reeks. The Kyoto Protocol costs far too much and won't work. In hasty response to observed global warming, it mandates very expensive and altogether arbitrary cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide. Even in most European countries, those cuts are unachievable under realistic assumptions about politically acceptable levels of economic sacrifice. And even if the CO2 reductions could be achieved, the effect, if any, on average temperatures would be minuscule. If a warming threat truly exists, there are much better ways to address it.
Yet Kyoto supporters-those in the EU most of all-act as though it's Kyoto or nothing. EU representatives expressed horror last March when US President George W. Bush gave voice to his country's already well-established rejection of Kyoto. They now feel vindicated by the agreement on Kyoto implementation in Marrakech. "The big question now is how we bring the United States into the biggest international effort against the greenhouse effect," Deleuze said.
The observation says much about European motivation. For EU leaders, the "big question" in the climate change debate isn't science. It isn't economics. It isn't the effect on poor people. It's politics.
Conflict of purpose
Coincidence of these meetings reveals a conflict of purpose in international politics. One meeting produces a trade agreement; the other advances Kyoto. One pulls the global economy away from trouble; the other pushes it back.
In the balance hangs the question whether appreciably more than half the world's population ever will experience the luxury of hope. Of course, most of those 3 billion human beings didn't get much news from either Doha or Marrakech. People who live on $2/day spend all their time surviving.
