WTO 3

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (www.conservativenannystate.org). He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. It can be found at the CEPR website, www.cepr.net.

In Truthout schrijft hij:

'The WTO and the World's Poor.
As President Bush once tried to say, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Paul Wolfowitz, who fooled us once when he was pitching the line about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as the Deputy Secretary of Defense, is now out to fool us again. In his new job as president of the World Bank, he is pitching the line that a new WTO agreement is the best way to help the world's poor.
His basic story is that protectionist barriers and subsidies in rich countries, especially in agriculture, are hugely harmful to the world's poor. He claims that if these barriers were removed, it would provide enormous benefits to the world's poor. Given Mr. Wolfowitz's track record, anyone who is not a fool would examine his claims very closely.
The standard economic models don't provide a basis for great hopes about a new WTO agreement. One recent analysis showed that the worldwide gains would be $54 billion a year. This might sound impressive, until you realize that it is equal to approximately 0.1 percent of world income. According to this model, approximately 1.9 percent of the gains would go to the world's poor, or close to $2 billion a year. With 1 billion poor people, this translates into an average gain of $2 a year.
Even this story might be too optimistic. Some of the world's poor will end up as losers from a WTO agreement. Cutting back subsidies to rich country farmers could be good news to the farmers who compete with them in the developing world, but it is surely bad news to consumers of these crops. They will have to pay more for their food. Some developing countries are net importers of agricultural products. They will end up as losers because they will be paying higher prices for their imports, with little or no gain on their exports.
The standard models also assume that the work force will remain fully employed. In the real world, workers who lose their jobs in the agricultural sector in developing countries may not be able to simply find new employment elsewhere. The mass displacement in Mexico's agricultural sector that followed in the wake of NAFTA has been one of the factors driving immigration into the United States.' Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/071206L.shtml