Philippines: Silence of the hounds

SUNDAY STORIES
By Marlen V. Ronquillo
Silence of the hounds


On the intensity and dedication to seeking power, profit and personal glory, nobody in the planet can beat Filipino politicians. They wield the perennial dagger, ready to pounce on whoever stands in the way of the selfish quests.
From Abra to Basilan is a long, corpse-strewn political highway, the ultimate and bloody testament to naked pursuit of power, profit and personal glory.
But count the commitment and engagement out on serious matters. Especially those that are not about self-aggrandizement but about the nation. There are very few politicians on the planet that are more indifferent to issues of national import than Filipino politicians. More so, if the issues require discernment and study.
Take the case of the news report out of the World Trade Organization (WTO) a few days back about the sly effort to developed economies to push for the approval of a NAMA accord, ahead of the declared vow to pass an agricultural trade deal first before anything else.
Not one of weight in the executive and the legislative, the heavy-hitters who live off sound bites and self-glorifying press statements, reacted to the news on the scheming to pass the NAMA. This all-important issue, that will have a bearing on our GDP, on our competitiveness, on our economic survival even, merited no discussion at all.
The country’s representative to the WTO, Ambassador Manuel Teehankee, issued a routine statement which stated that rushing the NAMA accord was unfair to developing economies such as the Philippines. But it was essentially an effete and feckless statement that got no support from the political big shots who would by routine rush in to comment on the most trivial issues of the day.
NAMA stands for Non­agriculture Market Access. It is a proposed trade deal that covers roughly 90 per cent of all globally traded goods, including fish and fishery and forestry products.
The 10 percent belongs to agricultural goods outside of fishery and forestry products. And according to the declared priorities of the WTO, the NAMA will only be taken up after the passage of the stalled talks on freer and more equitable agricultural trade that was the main agenda of the Doha Round of Talks in 2001.
It was the low-key voice of the peasantry in Congress, Butil Party’s Ka Nellie Chavez, who took the issue seriously and wrote a short piece on what was wrong with the NAMA. Never mind, Ka Nellie said, if I will be the solitary voice commenting on it. It is too serious an issue to ignore.

Rep. Chavez said that these are some of the things are grievously wrong about the NAMA:

1. It will remove the unbound tariff rates that the Philippines still maintain on 38.2 percent of all tariff lines. It is the unbound rates that give the Philippines the flexibility go carry out the necessary adjustments whenever some of our goods are threatened by dumping. In contrast, bound rates impose tariff ceilings which are rigid.

2. The NAMA will result in line-by-line cuts on all tariff lines and developing countries would suffer from this.

3. The agricultural trade deal, which was the anchor of the Doha Round of Ministerial Talks in Doha, Qatar, in 2001 may be archived once the rich countries have had their way with the NAMA passage.

4. There is this real fear that the NAMA is a throwback to the mercantilist arrangement of the colonizer-colony relationship.

5. A global regime of de-industrialization will set in on the developing countries once the NAMA is approved.
The rich countries and their indecent haste in trying to sneak in the NAMA validates the charge that OECD countries never really meant to pass a fair and equitable agricultural trade accord all along. The real agenda was to pass the NAMA, which can only be accomplished by a front act, a sweetener, which came in the form of a supposed agricultural accord acceptable to all, anchored on the removal of the huge agricultural subsidies by the rich countries.
But as it is with lies and subterfuges, they all end up unraveled. And the NAMA has been exposed as the cruel artifact of the discredited mercantilist order which much of the world had presumed as gone for good, swept away by the modernizing pull of current forces.