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Implications
for Less Developed Countries (LDCs), Including Muslim LDCs
On
the completion of Uruguay Round, Praful Bidwai commented:
For the South (Third World Countries) the issues go much beyond
trade and directly concern long term policies on investment,
agricultural growth, food subsidies for the poor, intellectual
property rights and patents, and the potential for development
itself. At stake is not just the sovereign rights of governments to
make domestic policies, but also the skewed nature of the prevalent
foreign trade regime, with its strong, built-in protectionist bias.(6)
The
UN Development Program estimated that in 1991, Northern
protectionism cost the Southern countries $30 billion in lost export
alone.
As
for TRIPS, the GATT agreement compels the members to legislate a
regime of intellectual property protection, including patents, that
inhibits innovation and invention, but legitimizes old, established
monopolies. Less than 5 percent of the world's 30 million or so
patents originate in the South. "This will mean innovators in
the South are effectively barred from putting to use novel ideas and
processes, however appropriate they might be to their societies or
economies, on the ground that they are already patented elsewhere,
and that even the importation of patented products from North to
South amounts to the 'working' of the patent."(7)
The
Third World now will be forced to permit and strengthen the North's
monopolies in the fields of drugs, food, and health-related goods.
Additionally, it will further raise health cost in the LDCs. Today,
countries like India and China have been producing pharmaceutical
products at one-half or less of their cost in the West. Such
countries not only meet their domestic demands, they earn lucrative
foreign exchange because of the competitiveness and
cost-effectiveness of their products. This measure will hurt the
competitiveness of Third World exporters, such as South Korea,
Taiwan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The measure will invariably injure
the agricultural sector of the Third World, too. Growth in
agriculture is attributed to good quality seeds and sophisticated
research in plant breeding.
Analogously,
the repercussion of the GATT agreement on service will be hostile
and ill-conceived for the Third World.
The agreement would allow multinational firms to invade newly
developed service sectors by demanding treatment on at par with
fledgling domestic firms. Potentially, this poses a threat to
Third-World insurance, banking and media, which national governments
have no way of meeting once they sign on the dotted line. This is a
recipe for unfettered cultural imperialism and finance capital
domination.(8)
In
compensation for the "memorandum of humiliation and
discrimination," the North pledged to give the South greater
access to its textiles and to phase out the discriminatory MFA. Even
if the West were to fulfill its promise, it would take seven to ten
years to get it implemented. The Agreement also attempts to bar
Asian companies, which are competitive in the international market
owing to their cost-effective techniques, which include the use of
low-wage workers, children, and labor-intensive techniques. The
United States is also attacking their competitiveness by passing
rules against child labor.
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