Cancun summit: Hot air and crumbs

"It is not enough to sit around tables talking like characters in Chekhov plays about insoluble problems. We have to lift ourselves above the immediate constrictions and offer the world a plan and a vision of hope without which nothing substantial can be achieved." Thus spake the report on the State of the World written last year by the 18-member Willy Brandt Commission, which led to the reluctant summit of 22 heads of government at Cancun, the luxurious new-resort on Mexico's Caribbean coast.The summit, however, did turn out to be an act taken out of a Chekhov play. Twenty-two actors spoke miles and miles of lines for two days at one another. The road to Cancun was lettered with sanitised rhetoric, stale platitudes, broken promises and failed strategies. The road out of Cancun was no different.The North-South divide has entered firmly the vocabulary of world politics in the last seven years. Trillions of words have been spoken to keep up a "dialogue" between the North - meaning the world's rich, industrialised capitalist nations - and the South, that is, the planet's 120 developing countries.The dictionary meaning of "dialogue" is: "conversation; piece of written work in conversational form; this kind of composition; conversational part in a novel; discussion between representatives of two groups etc.; exchange of proposals." Within the wide and diverse reach of the phrase, a North-South "dialogue" has become as much a fixture of the current world scenario as cold war, detente, and NIEO (New International Economic Order).In reality, the dialogists have developed diapause. They have nothing or very little to tell one another. Therefore they either talk to themselves or throw wordy dollops or missiles at one another. If the world is a bodypolitik, the systole-diastole rhythmic dilation of its heart remains seriously disturbed.The pulse is perilously abnormal. It's a miracle that the patient lives and looks deceptively well. And as long as it does so, they don't care - those who happen to control the world's existential levers.The world has always been divided between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak. Why, then, the sudden emergence of the North-South dividing line in the 1970s as a universally accepted geopolitical and geo-economic concept? Because, as novelist Joseph Heller would have put it: Something Happened.In 1974 the oil-producing Arab countries hiked the prices of petroleum and related products mercilessly, and threatened to use oil as a weapon with which to cut the jugular vein of the industrially developed capitalist nations.In 1975, Henry Kissinger, then US secretary of state, stood before the seventh special session of the UN General Assembly and made a highly regarded speech. He invited the "South" to abandon the path of confrontation and take the path of negotiation in order to resolve its differences with the "North".Kissinger, speaking on behalf of all capitalist powers, offered to consider on "a case-by-case basis", the negotiating manifesto of the Third World's "new economic order". He held up the carrot of "substantial transfer" of resources from the North to the South in the foreseeable future, freer trade and commerce, wider flow of aid from the rich nations to the poor, and more stable prices for the primary produces of Third World countries.Regan with Mrs Gandhi at Cancun: Duet of the deafThus was born the North-South dialogue. This creature, a modern unicorn, has moved from one conference hall to another during the last six years - it has been taken to Rome, Paris, Nairobi, Lima, Ottawa, New York, and other places by different groups of actors - the Club of the Rich, the Group of 77 and so on.At these forums, government representatives have talked endlessly about talks, while the unicorn, poor fellow, has watched listlessly and tried to penetrate the thickening haze of endless babble.Meanwhile, the rich capitalist regimes used the levers of power so cleverly that in less than five years they were able to transfer the real burden of brutally hiked oil prices to the poorer and the poorest of nations; to break the back of oil power; to shrink the flow of economic aid; to restrict rather than expand the export of Third World manufactures to the North; and to block every serious attempt on the part of producers of strategic raw materials or primary goods to form effective cartels on the model of OPEC.The New International Economic Order turned into a soiled and tarnished dream. The small number of rich capitalist countries who devised the world monetary and fiscal order after World War II held it in their grip, even though it became a chronic disorder. The oil-rich OPEC nations kept knocking at its door until they virtually gave up, exhausted and outwitted by the collective cunning of the controllers.Not that the South didn't get anything at all. They got crumbs. And politeness. No one, not even the poorest, was called "backward" any more. The South was now a collective of "developing" and "less developed" and "least developed" countries. A class divide took shape in the South.The semi-developed, semi-industrialised "middle class" nations were grimly polarised against the proletariat, a group of 30 countries, 20 of them in Africa and 10 in Asia. As many as 250 million people live in these Least Developed Countries (LDCS).Their GNP is less than $100 (Rs 900) per head; industry's share of GNP is less than 10 per cent, and literacy is below 20 per cent. This is the humanity that Simone de Beauvoir has called "unproductive population".Even within this pauperised humanity, there are class distinctions. The Algerian economist, Ahmed Baba Miske, shows in his book Open Letter to the Elites of the Third World how the privileged ruling elites - the military, the bureaucracy, politicians and other haves - have siphoned off the lion's share of all development aid flowing into the poor countries.A typical case is Bangladesh. During the six years of Zia-ur Rahman's rule, enormous quantities of foreign aid fattened a small elite in Dacca and other urban centres, while the bulk of 80 million Bangladeshis remained handcuffed with grinding poverty.Under the auspices of the UN, a conference of representatives of the 30 LDCS and those of the North was held in Paris last September. The UN released a lot of frightening statistics about the plight of these nations. In 1972 their oil bill was a mere $0.3 billion (Rs 270 crore); in 1980 it spiralled to a staggering $2.8 billion (Rs 2,520 crore) although they consumed very little petroleum.The burden of the oil forced them to reduce imports of manufactured goods. Nevertheless, in 1980 the LDCS paid $7.2 billion (Rs 6,480 crore) for those imports against $2.7 billion (Rs 2,430 crore) they had paid in 1970. Thus, the North and the OPEC nations, between them, succeeded in pushing 250 million human beings to the abyss of permanent penury.In 1977, the UN "fixed" a target of $ 14 billion (Rs 12,600 crore) in foreign aid to the LDCS. The total aid in 1979 came to $5 billion (Rs 4,500 crore), just above one-third of the target. In 1978, aid to LDCS was only 0.06 per cent of the combined GNP of the rich nations. The Paris conference "resolved" that aid in the 1980s should rise to 0.15 per cent of the rich nations' GNP. Everyone knows it will not.Before the Cancun summit, the North and the South met separately to construct their strategies. The leaders of the seven richest industrialised nations met in Ottawa in the last week of July only to disagree on almost everything.President Ronald Reagan at first refused to grace Cancun with his winning smiles, taking the characteristic position that he would not be seen in the company of the infidel Fidel Castro. The Mexican President, realising that Reagan's absence would plant the kiss of death on the North-South "dialogue," agreed to keep Castro out of the meet.If the world is a bodypolitik, the systole-diastole rhythmic dilation of its heart remains seriously disturbed. The pulse is perilously abnormal. It's a miracle that the patient lives and look so deceptively well. And as long as it does so, they don't care - those who happen to control the world's existential lovers. At Ottawa, Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put up a stiff opposition to the Willy Brandt Commission's recommendation that the North must, in the medium-range future, transfer substantial portions of resources to the Soffth.France and Canada supported the recommendations, while Japan and Germany took ambivalent positions somewhere in between. Reagan pushed the conservative American view that the onus of aiding the poorer countries must be transferred to the OPEC nations and to private enterprise in the North.The South had its preparatory meeting in New York. The "group of 24" drew up a list of issues to be discussed at Cancun. Then came the meeting of the foreign ministers of the 22 countries that were chosen for the Cancun summit.At that meeting, held at Cancun early August, it was decided that the summit would not have a formal agenda nor would it issue a communique or declaration. The US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, made it clear that the summit would not go beyond "interpersonal relationships between heads of government who haven't met".The composition of the summit mirrors the class and caste system in world affairs. The South was represented overwhelmingly by the oil-rich (Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Venezuela) and the "middle class" nations (Mexico, Brazil, India and the Philippines). Among the three African countries represented, only Tanzania belongs to the world proletariat; keeping it company was Bangladesh from Asia.Cancun, then, showed that the competition for world wealth and fiscal-monetary power is now confined to three groups of nations: the rich industrial capitalist countries of the North, the oil-rich members of the OPEC, and the "middle class" powers like India, Brazil, Mexico, China, South Korea and Philippines. The "middle class" nations take away the bulk of the international aid that is now available. They have begun to challenge the North's mastery of Third World markets.At the Cancun summit discussions were held on the basis a Mexican document which identified five basic areas of "dialogue". In each area, the North and the South started with yawning gaps and ended without narrowing them. Even though a lot of pleasantries were exchanged and much rhetoric delivered, no process has been evolved to keep a continuous dialogue going.The first area was cooperation. The South wanted the North to commit 0.7 per cent of its GNP to foreign aid by 1985 and 1 per cent by the year 2000, with an increasing share of the aid channelled through multilateral institutions like the World Bank. The strongest resistance came from the United States.American foreign aid is now only 0.27 per cent of its GNP and, what is worse, less than 20 per cent of all American economic assistance is multilateral. Half of all bilateral US aid goes to only two countries, Israel and Egypt. In contrast, North European countries like Sweden, Norway and Holland, already give almost 1 per cent of their GNP as foreign aid.France under a socialist president is agreeable to rapidly raise its foreign aid to 1 per cent of GNP. In trade the South sought, in vain, greater access to the Northern markets while in food the South asked for, again in vain, a UN system of food reserves based on agreed, rather than voluntary, contributions.In energy, the South urged greater conservation by the North which currently consumes 75 per cent of world energy. In the fifth area, namely, monetary and financial questions, the South asked for a massive transfer of resources to enable their economies to grow steadily.In none of these areas could the South wrest significant concessions from the North. Canada, Sweden, Austria and France were favourable to reforms in the world economic structure to assist the poorer nations. But the United States, backed by Britain, refused to yield any significant ground.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Oct 26, 2013 13:22 IST--- ENDS ---

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Cancun summit: Hot air and crumbs

Before the Cancun summit, the North and the South met separately to construct their strategies. The leaders of the seven richest industrialised nations met in Ottawa only to disagree on almost everything.

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