After six days of intensive and often acrimonious negotiations, trade ministers from the 149 member countries of the World Trade Organization reached an agreement to restart stalled global trade talks.
The deal, struck in the dying hours of the ministerial meeting in Hong Kong last month, sets out an ambitious roadmap for the conclusion of a sweeping new trade deal on agriculture, non-agricultural market access and services by the end of this year.
“We have managed to put the round back on track after a period of hibernation,” said WTO director general Pascal Lamy.
The centerpiece of the agreement is the elimination of all agricultural export subsidies by 2013 — a key demand of developing countries. But in exchange for the agreement on agriculture, developing country members were forced to make significant concessions in other areas, including trade in services.
The Africa Trade Network, the group coordinating the activities of African NGOs, said the services agreement was the “clearest loss” for developing countries.
“The right to choose which services sectors to open and to what extent, according to their own national needs, has been undermined,” the group said in a statement. “The text on services will put enormous pressures on African countries to open up sensitive service sectors.”
One of the sensitive sectors being targeted in the current talks is education, said CAUT associate executive director David Robinson, a delegate at the WTO ministerial meeting.
“Many industrialized countries clearly see education exports as a key offensive interest in the current round of talks, but have been frustrated by the slow pace of negotiations to date,” Robinson said. “The agreement reached in Hong Kong is designed to put added pressure on countries to make deeper commitments in all service sectors, including public services like education.”
The Hong Kong ministerial declaration proposes a major change in the way the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) would be negotiated. Until now, the practice has been for individual countries to exchange requests and offers with no obligation for any country to respond to a request. The new proposal — called “plurilateral” negotiations — will see groups of demandeurs with an interest in some particular sector approach target countries together.
“Instead of facing demandeurs one-on-one, target countries will now have to confront a group of countries who are the most aggressive demandeurs in the sector,” said Scott Sinclair, a trade policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “The intention is to greatly intensify the pressure on governments to make commitments in services like education.”
A new plurilateral group — the so-called friends of private education exports — has already formed in New Zealand, said Sinclair, with the intention of winning more commitments from more countries on education services.
Robinson argues that the plurilateral approach to negotiations creates a potential problem for Canada.
“Canada’s official GATS position has been that it will not make any commitments on public education services,” he said. “Now, we will face serious pressure to open up our education markets.”
He warns that if Canada were to make commitments on private education services, the public system could be exposed because the lines between public and private institutions are blurring.
“Most universities and colleges now have commercial appendages to promote marketable products or to help secure private research funding and consultancy work,” Robinson said. “In some countries, so-called public universities also house private programs. In this way, if commitments are made on commercial education services, Canada could very well unwittingly expose its domestic public post-secondary system to the provisions of GATS.”
Canada should tread with caution on that issue, he said, as GATS rules could enforce open education markets and enable offshore institutions and companies to engage freely in education activities in Canada.
Such liberalization, said Robinson, could adversely affect the quality and accessibility of post-secondary education, and ultimately lock-in and intensify the pressures of privatization and commercialization.
There is also another aspect of the Hong Kong ministerial declaration that could seriously affect public services like education, Sinclair said. The declaration calls on members to conclude negotiations aimed at developing rules on domestic regulation before the end of the current round. The aim is to ensure that regulatory frameworks that governments adopt about qualification requirements, licensing and technical standards are “not more burdensome than necessary.”
“With the stroke of a negotiator’s pen, literally thousands of regulations designed to protect the public interest would be exposed to WTO oversight and potential challenge,” Sinclair said. “Many types of government regulations covering education and other public services would be affected. For example, disciplines developed on licensing requirements would apply to university and college accreditation.”
“Offshore education providers want to weaken regulations which govern the accreditation and quality assessment of institutions,” Robinson said. “Restrictions on domestic regulation, as they are being proposed, could very well facilitate that. This is something that could seriously erode the quality of post-secondary education in Canada and around the world.”
Following the agreement in Hong Kong, GATS negotiations are scheduled to resume in earnest. Plurilateral requests are to be tabled by the end of February 2006, with a second round of revised offers to be submitted by July 31, 2006. The deadline for a final deal is Oct. 31, 2006.