From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

FROM POVERTY TO POWERPatents: Intellectual property laws restrict developing countries fromaccessing technology and drive up the cost of all technology-richproducts, including life-saving medicines. The trade deal currentlyproposed between the USA and Colombia, for example, wouldincrease medicine costs by $919m by 2020 – enough to provide healthcare for 5.2 million people under the public health system. Under theUS–Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement(DR-CAFTA) the prices that poor farmers pay for agrochemicals areexpected to rise several-fold. 56While the current international rules for the flow of goods, services,capital, and knowledge create problems such as these, the lack of rulesin other areas creates further obstacles to development: first, managingthe flow of the other factor of production, labour (i.e. people); andsecond, regulating the behaviour of the most powerful actors in theinternational economic system, transnational corporations.International trade is governed by overlapping sets of rules andregulations. Importing companies impose ever more sophisticatedstandards on quality, safety, and traceability, which would-beexporters must satisfy. Governments impose another layer of healthstandards. Regional and bilateral trade and investment agreementslimit what tariffs a government can charge on imports, what subsidiesit can pay its producers and exporters, what obligations it can place onforeign investors, and how it regulates patents. Standing above allthese, and to some extent locking them in place, is the World TradeOrganization, which oversees 15 agreements signed during the‘Uruguay Round’ of global trade talks. 57The forerunner of the WTO, the General Agreement on Tariffs andTrade (GATT) was set up after the Second World War, in part to avoida return to 1930s-style trade wars between the major powers whichtriggered a traumatic global recession. However, with the upgradingof the GATT into the WTO in 1995 came a number of worryingdevelopments that coincided with, and to some extent came toepitomise, growing public disquiet about the impact of globalisation,as became clear when the WTO’s Seattle ministerial meeting in 1999collapsed amid public protests and clouds of teargas.Two years later, the WTO sought to recover from the ‘battle ofSeattle’ by launching a set of global trade talks dubbed the Doha320