by Nizam Ahmad
Eco-Imperialism.com

LONDON, September 2003 In Bangladesh, extensive media coverage and government work will be visible now due to the biennial WTO Ministerial Conference, held this year in Cancun, Mexico. Government officials, macro-economists and NGOs will argue trade terms at the Conference and after.

Documented as a weak trade negotiator, Bangladesh will certainly have another repeat performance at the Conference where it is all about negotiations and, sadly, nothing else. Earlier, foreign grants had poured in, trainings were organised, and trade negotiations were rehearsed to equip Bangladesh’s stale bureaucracy with the needed skills to negotiate with governments at the WTO ministerial conference.

At a recently arranged International Policy Network’s [IPN] media briefing in London, about IPN’s Global Freedom to Trade Campaign, Barun Mitra of India’s Liberty Institute opined that trade negotiations carried out by governments of the world paint a grim picture of a zero-sum game, instead of a win-win summation. Trade is a willing outcome never coerced. Trade has boundless and borderless opportunities that can gainfully satisfy people across nations.

What then is there for governments to negotiate trade terms? What do government officials and academics know about market conditions or the mind of the trader to generalise abiding conditions into a trade policy?

Government intrusions have made trade a difficult subject. However, it promotes a notion that officials and economists can improve miserable economic conditions, by skilfully extracting favourable trade terms at conferences as in Mexico.

The Bangladesh government is in existence for 32 years and what have they done for our economy other than for themselves at their personal level? If for 32 years the Bangladesh government failed and were incapable, corrupt, and internationally identified to possess no negotiating skills, other than extending their begging bowl, how could they be trusted again to do anything valuable for the people at the WTO meeting that is an organisation made of, inherently similar, many governments?

Governments of Bangladesh along with NGOs and development partners have indeed contributed to produce chunky poverty alleviating plans and documents but the reality has been quite different and deplorable for Bangladeshis. The rich governments too have been faltering to sustain their war and welfare State that ushered into limelight as model States after World War II; but let us here dwell on the LDCs as Bangladesh where hunger, death, disease and government failure are gigantic.

Abraham Lincoln’s “a government of the people, by the people and for the people” is the biggest utopia after Karl Marx’s class struggle and classless welfare. Communism failed to live up to its promises and so have governments. A government cannot be for or of the people, but of itself, by itself and for itself only. It has its collective bureaucracy and works to sustain and enrich itself first, last and always.

Politicians come to wear the crown and to promise everything, to suppress its opponents and to live in a state of inexcusable splendour like hated monarchs. Governance is crude and vulgar in poor countries but less so in the rich world. Nevertheless, no country can claim topping a list in an index of good governance. There is no international competition between governments to be good neither any set of rules what governments should be all about. However, the term good governance has lately become a phrase too often pronounced in Bangladesh at conferences of development experts, non-profit organisations, government bureaucracy and the World Bank.

Bangladesh government’s market hegemony has made businesspersons to stick firm with government officials. Together, they monopolise a market and derive large commercial settlements by keeping out competition – foreign or home grown amid many other things. Almost all successful corporations in Bangladesh owe their bigness to government alone.

Scattered around are few jobs, but skilfully generated is media propaganda to portray economic wonders, of job creation, of growth and national development. Government plans, as we have witnessed for decades, do not benefit individuals other than their own. It toils for the people in prints and plans, in sermons and at seminars.

A government only of laws, by laws and standing for upholding laws should replace the kind of government we presently have or have had. Only such a government based on laws, unlike charities or religion, that is not entrusted or looked upon to serve, guide and uplift the wide-ranging conditions of human race would best serve the individual interest, and therefore of everyone. Laws should fasten governments to basic functions and not make it into a deity for the people, of the people and by the people.

Government is at best, a purposeful institution provided it strongly uphold few elemental laws that come to life when people act upon those laws and rules to protect and promote their life, liberty and property at nobody’s expense.

Such set of unchangeable laws applicable to all and not the government or the people we elect, will safeguard our economic rights and freedom. We need no permission or the consent of an authority to exercise our right to trade or to wait for a government to negotiate trade terms with foreign economies.

Trade in Bangladesh is a perilous livelihood. Newspapers flash pictures of seized goods and arrests of poor rural traders. News despatches narrate how smuggling ruins our economy and how much the government is losing in revenues.

We ignore the fact that unless the people inside Bangladesh did not want such foreign merchandise, the traders would not be risking their lives to supply the stores, nor would the shopkeepers build such stocks.

At shops, we are able to exercise our freedom to choose what we buy by the work of the smuggler who brings in a selection of goods and services. Has any smuggler ever forced us to buy their goods or coerced shops to stock what they trade in?

Despite the market facts, the government of Bangladesh happily executes a lethal policy (endorsed directly or indirectly by the World Bank, Chamber bodies, stakeholders and development thinkers and partners), to shoot at sight all cross-border traders, to seize goods they suspect were smuggled in and to harass loaded trucks running inter-district distribution networks.

The traders often resist government harassments but not for long. A policy that sadistically suppresses free trade helps to protect government-sanctioned businesses from competition.

By obstructing trade, Bangladesh as a region had hit the poverty button several times. The violent separation of India and Pakistan in 1947 was the first instance. Suddenly disrupted were normal trade routes between the two foes. The India-Pakistan war in 1965 with India had further shut all trade routes between them. Shut down since then were East Pakistan’s train, road and river access with Eastern India. Bangabandhu’s 6-point formula in 1966 gained ground across East Pakistan because of an economic contraction.

The bloody independence of Bangladesh in 1971 cut off trade ties with (West) Pakistan. It was then the socialists-nationalists implemented their rosy vision of a Bangladeshi economy, of economic caps and boundaries unless the government, in Maharaja fashion, decide and negotiate otherwise.

Instantly, Bangabandhu’s government became one of the most unpopular in the history of Bangladesh. Nevertheless, that initial vision is the practice of all governments and since governments have total command over economy, individuals of the government and their collaborators have been grabbing everything for themselves for the past 32 years, at the grievous cost of our prosperity.

To end our economic insufficiency, we should go for unilateral opening of all trade routes – regional and international. Conferences as in Mexico and of SAARC that collectively resolve to open markets or set trade terms on a reciprocal basis, invite the same government friendly corporations and its allies to extort conditions that favour those most.

The outcome of WTO negotiations is predictable. There will be more Rounds of negotiations, jobs and training for trade experts, bureaucrats and, sadly, nothing for the people and the marketplace.