Missing the trees for the wood

IN Opinion | 15/08/2005

You don`t say!

Darius Nakhoonwala

Just as night follows day, last week`s publication of the Nanavati Commission report on who was to blame for the Sikh riots of 1984 was followed by the agonised moans of the leader writers. What else could the poor dears do, anyway, but agonise and moan?

After all, it was there, it was easy and it could be done effortlessly. So not just the leader writers, some of whom are young I dare say, but the columnists as well trooped in mouth first. Everyone, it seems, wanted to say, "Hey, I was there, too, remember?"

Well, good, we saw some pretty standard stuff. The media, I am sure would like to think that it was its howls that led to the proper action being taken, namely the sacking of Jagdish Tytler and the resignation of Sajjan Kumar. HKL Bhagat, I am told, is being punished by the Almighty.

So let`s leave it there, and see what else of import happened last week and what the editorialists had to say. In terms of real importance, the topic was the forthcoming succession at the WTO, whereby Pascal Lamy, a European, will become the head. Mr Lamy is known to say privately that international trade is not about economics but only about politics.

The Telegraph, with its customary felicity with a turn of phrase, put it nicely. "Nations are equal in theory and fractious in practice; the politics of international institutions can be Byzantine and convoluted." It then traced the politics of the highest appointment at the WTO and then delivered the coup de grace. "…in 2004, the member countries worked out a procedure for selection, involving a beauty contest — candidates got two months to exhibit themselves to members — and a behind-the-scenes consultation process to establish who had most support. That process has led to the appointment of Mr Pascal Lamy, a member of France`s elite financial civil service, confidante of Mr Jacques Delors, and a habitué of Brussels, the capital of the European Union." There the edit lost its way and instead of telling us more about Mr Lamy, it went off into by-lanes

Amongst the financial papers, Business Standard was the only one to take note, but it used the occasion to provide a 500 word review of ten years of WTO. This is a presumption only journalists are capable of. But as usual, it carried it off with competence, if not the cleverness and elegance of the Telegraph. The burden of its song was the WTO had done much of what it was meant to do but that there were problems ahead and that Mr Lamy would be severely tested during his term. The paper should have spelt out why - because of the US, rather than the developing countries -- but ran of words, I think.

The Hindu ran an edit on international trade but pegged it on something else - the passing of CAFTA, or the Central American Free Trade Agreement by the US House by just two votes. No one else in India noticed, which was entirely dumb. The agreement binds the world`s biggest economy with five of the world`s smallest, and poorest, economies — namely, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras , and Nicaragua. "FTAs, often frowned upon by the World Trade Organisation as running counter to its objective of non-discriminatory trade, have become an instrument which nations increasingly resort to for tackling problems created by globalisation and what they see as the lack of progress in multilateral trade negotiations."

"It will be naïve to believe", said the paper, "that protectionism and restrictions on outward flow of capital would help the US sustain its competitiveness and employment growth." FTAs are not a universal problem solver but they at least provide some alternatives to the old practices of direct or indirect colonisation "at the instance of powerful corporations."