COMMENTARY BY OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., November 22, 2018 — In September the government announced the appointment of Zhivargo Laing, former Minister of State for Finance in the previous FNM government led by Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham, to lead The Bahamas’ negotiating team for accession to World Trade Organization (WTO) membership.
During a press conference on September 9, 2018, the Hon. Brent Symonette, Minister of Financial Services, Trade and Industry and Immigration, noted that the government is confident that Mr. Laing is well-suited to lead accession negotiations and ensure that the terms of WTO membership would be mutually beneficial to The Bahamas and WTO members.
“Mr. Laing, who is trained in economics and finance, once had responsibility for international trade policy and during his tenure as Minister of State for Finance led The Bahamas’ application to accede to the WTO in 2001,” Minister Symonette said.
There is no question that Mr. Laing is well qualified to carry out the weighty responsibilities entrusted to him. He is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, from where he received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Agro-economics, and he subsequently pursued graduate courses at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., concentrating on business administration.
What’s more, as Minister of Financial Services, Trade and Industry and Immigration Symonette pointed out at September’s press conference, Mr. Laing led The Bahamas’ application to accede to the WTO in 2001 when he was Minister of State for Finance.
Since that announcement, however, there has been a raging debate in The Bahamas as to whether or not joining the WTO is in the best interest of the country.
I think Mr. Laing provided some “food for thought” at the press conference announcing his appointment as the country’s lead WTO negotiator when he said that his appointment comes at a ‘unique’ time as he currently leads the Government and Public Policy Institute at the University of The Bahamas (UB).
Referring to the fact that UB President Dr. Rodney Smith and UB Provost Dr. Linda A. Davis were at the press conference, Mr. Laing said their presence “signals the university’s support of my appointment as Chief Negotiator.”
“The university will bring to bear its substantial resources to ensure that these kinds of undertakings are grounded in informed expertise,” Mr. Laing noted. “In fact, we at the university invite the government to consider other areas in which UB faculty and researchers can add value and build capacity within the country by serving as consultants where necessary.”
Unfortunately, many of the naysayers who have already concluded that WTO is not in the best interest of The Bahamas are woefully ill-informed about what the WTO actually is. They are well-represented among the frequent contributors to the various groups on Facebook who seem to have solutions to all of the problems that exist in the country – political and otherwise – but have extreme difficulty syntactically constructing a sentence that includes proper grammar.
One of the main spokespersons on a video I watched of the “Rights Bahamas” demonstration in downtown Nassau on Wednesday, November 22, 2018, actually warned the government that they are already planning to demonstrate against the WTO.
After watching that video, I decided to do a little research on the Internet for information on the WTO. I hope the attached information will educate Bahamians sufficiently so that they can make an informed decision on whether the WTO is in the best interest of The Bahamas. Hopefully, those naysayers who generally do not read beyond the introductory paragraph or articles that they consider “long” will take a little time to understand what the WTO is all about.
WHAT IS THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION (WTO)
There are a number of ways of looking at the WTO. It’s an organization for liberalizing trade. It’s a forum for governments to negotiate trade agreements. It’s a place for them to settle trade disputes. It operates a system of trade rules. (But it’s not Superman, just in case anyone thought it could solve — or cause — all the world’s problems!)
Above all, it’s a negotiating forum … Essentially, the WTO is a place where member governments go, to try to sort out the trade problems they face with each other. The first step is to talk. The WTO was born out of negotiations, and everything the WTO does is the result of negotiations. The bulk of the WTO’s current work comes from the 1986-94 negotiations called the Uruguay Round and earlier negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO is currently the host to new negotiations, under the “Doha Development Agenda” launched in 2001.
Where countries have faced trade barriers and wanted them lowered, the negotiations have helped to liberalize trade. But the WTO is not just about liberalizing trade, and in some circumstances its rules support maintaining trade barriers — for example to protect consumers or prevent the spread of disease.
It’s a set of rules … At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations. These documents provide the legal ground-rules for international commerce. They are essentially contracts, binding governments to keep their trade policies within agreed limits. Although negotiated and signed by governments, the goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business, while allowing governments to meet social and environmental objectives.
The system’s overriding purpose is to help trade flow as freely as possible — so long as there are no undesirable side-effects — because this is important for economic development and well-being. That partly means removing obstacles. It also means ensuring that individuals, companies and governments know what the trade rules are around the world, and giving them the confidence that there will be no sudden changes of policy. In other words, the rules have to be “transparent” and predictable.
And it helps to settle disputes … This is a third important side to the WTO’s work. Trade relations often involve conflicting interests. Agreements, including those painstakingly negotiated in the WTO system, often need interpreting. The most harmonious way to settle these differences is through some neutral procedure based on an agreed legal foundation. That is the purpose behind the dispute settlement process written into the WTO agreements.
The WTO began life on 1 January 1995, but its trading system is half a century older. Since 1948, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) had provided the rules for the system. (The second WTO ministerial meeting, held in Geneva in May 1998, included a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the system.)
It did not take long for the General Agreement to give birth to an unofficial, de facto international organization, also known informally as GATT. Over the years GATT evolved through several rounds of negotiations.
The last and largest GATT round was the Uruguay Round, which lasted from 1986 to 1994 and led to the WTO’s creation. Whereas GATT had mainly dealt with trade in goods, the WTO and its agreements now cover trade in services, and in traded inventions, creations and designs (intellectual property).
