The Holiday Hangzhou, Costa Coffee and the Breakdown in the WTO Talks

This is not, strictly speaking, a China post with the holiday sort of already coming to an end. Tomorrow I will take the bus or taxi to Suzhou and tie up the odds and ends there before going to London, which, means that my eighteen months in China is also coming to an end!

Sitting here in a Costa Coffee in Hangzhou I now find myself with time to catch up with the news and pride of place in today's news is given to the breakdown in the WTO talks. These talks began in Doha in 2001 and were meant to facilitate redressing some of the imbalances in favour of the rich nations. Imbalances, which were only compounded by the agreements that were signed at Marrakesh in 1994 and were neglected during subsequent talks. In Doha the developed countries commited themselves to ensuring that the negotiations would be a "development round".1 The poorest countries were to benefit and what has happened? Simply put, while the EU has shown its willingness to compromise, the United States refuses to budge effectively on the question of its agricultural subsidies in general and on its subsidies to cotton farms in particular. Most of the money here goes to massive farms and, indeed, invariably to corporate farms.2 These subsidies represent a form of coorporate welfare and they ensure that the cotton farmer in, for instance, India continues to struggle just to keep body and soul together. Subsidies for agriculture in the west are very different and they have very different consequences from agricultural subsidies and tariffs in the developing world. The 'special safeguard mechanism', which is employed by developing countries allows those countries to raise farm tariffs if imports surge. This is a very different situation from the top 20% of cotton "farmers" in the United States who receive 80% of the subsidies there or, in other words, an average of almost $200,000. In the meantime the United States can argue that it has opened up its markets to about 97% of the goods produced in the third world; the 'Banana Republic' is not allowed to export bananas but it can export all of those things, which it is incapable of producing. The United States has no interest in a level playing field.

So for me the holiday is coming to an end but I would just like to say that the Costa Coffee in Hangzhou is just about one of the nicest Costa Coffees I have been in. The German word "lauschig" might best describe it. Outside we are surrounded by bamboos, there is a chirping and chirring in the trees, the big coffee is finished, this post is finished and it is time to "carpe diem". By the way if there were no globalisation, there would be no Costa Coffee in Hangzhou.

The picture looks through the window in the Costa Coffee down by the west lake in Hangzhou.

1 Joseph Stiglitz, 'Making Gobalization Work' (London 2007) p80

2 ibid p86