After nearly a week of negotiations and widely held expectations that the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Meeting in Hong Kong would end in failure, the WTO released a Ministerial Declaration yesterday that largely ignores the demands of developing countries. In a victory for corporate globalization, some developing countries aligned with the G20 bloc of countries that emerged out of the Cancun Ministerial Meeting agreed to cut tariffs on agricultural, services, and industrial markets. In exchange for some market access in Agriculture for Brazil and services outsourcing possibilities for India, the G20, led by Brazil and India, largely abandoned other developing countries. Moreover, the new text opens the way for dramatically increased services (telecommunications, insurance, banking, etc) access, launching a new round of negotiations that will force developing countries to give foreign investors the same rights as local suppliers. Developing countries have described this opening of services as irreversible and have warned that it will strip developing countries of their right to pursue their own development course. Developing countries had sought provisions that would allow them to open their countries to foreign services only if it is in their national interest. Before this round of negotiations, developing countries had the flexibility to decide which sectors to open and when to do it.
Despite militant protests on the last day of the meeting with protestors attempting to physically push their way into the meeting along with a variety of other protests, activists were unable to prevent the adoption of the flawed Ministerial. The final text failed to address any of the problems with the draft Declaration and instead only differed slightly with word choice and punctuation.
