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The meeting has failed to reach an agreement, and that's a good thing. The talks are over, and the televisions inside the convention centre that showed the open proceedings all week are now running nature documentaries on flamingos.
It is chaotic inside the convention centre, as delegates have left the main meeting room and are speaking with the media and NGOs. Many people have put their "explicit consent" lanyards back on, and some NGO delegates are chanting "No means No" to reinforce the failure of the talks.
The talks ended when the Kenyan delegation, frustrated on the lack of progress on agriculture issues, walked out of the meeting.
Many on our team are inside the convention centre, speaking to the press and other NGOs. They are saying the WTO process created so many problems for the non-corporate world (the rest of us) that it was bound to fail. Now there needs to be an international effort to create a more accountable process for coming up with trade rules that respect environmental and social concerns.
The rest of the team are back at the office, calling media and translating statements. The European Union is preparing to hold a press conference to explain their role in the failure of the talks.
We were planning on holding a low key demonstration near the end of the meeting this afternoon, but it has now been cancelled. We have two large eyeball balloons that we were going to inflate with helium and fly from outside our office, to remind the delegates (who could see them from the building) that the world was watching what kind of deals they reached.
The EU Agriculture Commissioner, Franz Fischler, has said that the meeting is over. When the EU walks out, the talks collapse. It is official, not a rumour: the talks have collapsed without agreements being reached by the delegates.
The WTO meeting process is very secretive, so all we have right now is rumours. The meeting is either about to fall apart, or the European Union is getting ready for hard bargaining, or there is a comet about to impact the convention centre.
Okay, I made that last one up.
Several countries are threatening to leave the process (it was supposed to end at 3 today) mainly through unsubstantiated rumours.
Another rumour has the EU is reorganizing so that it can continue negotiating on the new issues it wants the WTO to start discussing.
After five days of meeting and very little sleep, rumours are running rampant.
Feelings and facts
The feelings: every day the sadness, the anger and the impotence grow and grow. It seems that no NGOs, no countries, no protesters have the power, the talent, the capability to challenge, to stop, to change the one-way route that the WTO has decided to take. Even, with the arguments, the numbers, the faces, the facts that prove neoliberal policies are not working in the benefit of the people. So it goes.
The facts: the final text of WTO is going to be worse for poor countries and for their citizens that what everybody was expecting. This means, again, nothing for the majority, everything for the minority. There is surprise and disappointment all around this hot and wet Cancun, all around this little and connected planet with the release of the draft of the WTO ministerial meeting.
Nobody knows how this draft was obtained, given the fact that dozens of NGOs were there, in the Convention Center, every day saying that WTO policies were not fair, were forced. Given the fact that around 80 countries -poor countries, of course- have said clearly and loudly 'NO' to several things, like new issues and subsidies to agriculture and have demanded clearly to go ahead on decisions just when they were agreed by EXPLICIT CONSENSUS. This is not happening. So it goes.
More feelings: Every day I think of Mr. Lee Kyung. Nothing is the same but nothing has changed.
Cecilia Navarro is a press officer with the Greenpeace office in Mexico City.
No, not the rooms where celebrities get their makeup done, but a nasty WTO negotiating procedure that puts rich country pressure on poorer nations that are holding out.
Green rooms are a peculiar negotiating procedure at the WTO. At first, negotiations take place in the main room, with all delegates (but not the press or NGOs) given access to the negotiations. If there is a particularly sticky set of negotiations, the 'green rooms' come into effect. WTO officials decide that a few select delegations will sequester themselves in a room, and secretly hammer out a negotiation.
Delegates who can attend these sessions are hand-picked, and are forbidden from reporting on what goes on in these secret negotiations. This is a way for rich countries to isolate and put pressure on smaller countries that may be standing up for themselves. WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi had said earlier this year to stop this pressure negotiating practice.
Yesterday evening, a green room session was initiated in the Director General Panitchpakdi's office. Delegates from the US, EU, India, China, Brazil, Malaysia,Kenya, South Africa and Mexico met for two hours. The heads of the delegations met, without their aides.
The aim was to pressure these countries into coming up with an 'agreement' on , and to stop holding up the steamroller of 'free trade.' Sounds like forced trade to me.
A closing ceremony has been scheduled for three o'clock this afternoon, but no one really knows how long this meeting will last.
The closing plenary is scheduled for 3 pm, but it may be canceleed to allow negotiations to continue. Yesterday Pascal Lamy, the head of the EU delegation, said that negotiations could continue for two more days, until Tuesday.
It might be a good sign if the negotiations wrap up at three this afternoon. That would most likely mean that agreement has not been reached, that negotiations broke down over adding new issues to negotiate in the next year. The power of the WTO would not have expanded, and it would be some measure of success.
Negotiations inside the 'green rooms' of the WTO meeting continued all night, while outside our team worked to try to influence those negotiations.
Members of our team had a long night, meeting with other NGOs and journalists to put our assessment out there.
We have also been meeting with delegates from smaller delegations, to offer what support and analysis we can. These smaller delegations, often from poorer countries, are our best chance at influencing the outcome of the negotiations. While the larger delegations from the U.S. and the EU can keep negotiating around the clock with their dozens of delegates, the smaller delegations cannot effectively negotiate for days without sleep. We can work with other NGOs to support them with our team, to make sure they do not cave in to bad deals.
At this point, they can use our support. They are having their arms twisted to agree to talk about investment rules over the next year. We are opposed to these "new issues" being added to the negotiations, as it adds to the power of the WTO. In particular, the rich countries want to create binding investment rules which amount to a global bill of rights for corporations, with no corresponding set of responsibilities on environmental and social rules. A nasty set of discussions indeed.
A large number of poorer countries are opposed to adding issues to the WTO negotiations. But the EU is trying to get four new issues added to the discussions. They are putting pressure on poorer countries to agree to this by stating that there will not be an agreement on agriculture (which poorer countries desperately want) until they agree to start negotiations on these new issues. Arm twisting indeed.