Scaling the summit
What is the point of political high-altitude partying, asks Gamal Nkrumah
The season of high-altitude partying is upon us once again. A coterie of exalted characters including the world's political and business leaders converged on the plush Swiss Alpine resort of Davos. Skiing, a traditional aside at the annual gathering, was out of the question as temperatures plummeted to minus-16C, giving participants more time to dwell on such pressing issues as the stalled global trade talks, escalating budget deficits in the world's largest economies and the social impact of globalisation.
Last year, the Iraqi crisis put the world into a political spin. This year, also, politics -- as opposed to economics -- dominated discussions at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Topics touched upon ranged from the Middle East crisis to health concerns. "Obesity is a huge issue," warned United States Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson at a seminar devoted to dangers of corpulence. Still vital topics such as increased stability in commodity prices and food security in developing countries were touched upon at the five-day meeting which ended on Sunday.
So can high politics help grease the wheels of world trade? Conventional wisdom holds that policy-makers cannot resolve the world's economic woes from their ivory towers. Environmentalists and anti-globalisation activists charged that the Davos gathering as the exclusive preserve of the rich and powerful does not have the interests of the poor at heart. "[Davos] continues to be used by corporations for commercial interests, which is why the environment and poor people continue to suffer," says Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth International. "That is not open. That is not a public debate," Juniper added.
Representatives of developing countries concurred and bitterly complained about the need for a more equitable international agricultural trade system. They stressed that 70 per cent of the world's poorest people live in the rural areas of developing countries.
"Is a farmer in Tanzania or Senegal of the same worth as a farmer in France or the US," Egypt's Trade Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali asked rhetorically. "It is time," United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in much the same vein, "to re-balance the international agenda".
The wealthy nations no longer bother to make a show of listening sympathetically to the demands of the developing countries. Trade talks in the Mexican seaside resort of Cancun collapsed last year because rich countries refused to reduce the subsidies they pay their farmers. Developing countries demand that wealthy nations open up their markets to agricultural produce from poor countries and stop subsidising the relatively rich farmers in the developed countries.
The unjust world economic order is stirring up furious debate in developing countries. People in even the remotest corners of the world are becoming increasingly part of the global market system. Developing countries are asked to reform politically and deregulate their economies. There are plenty of privatisation plans and economic reforms on the drawing and the anti-globalisation campaign is gaining momentum across the world.
At the Davos Convention Centre, Klaus Schwab, president of the World Economic Forum and head of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, outlined the Herculean task at hand.
United States President George W Bush was conspicuously absent, but he dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney instead. Flush with an exaggerated triumphalism, the Bush administration made it abundantly clear that it wanted Iraq to top the agenda at Davos.
In sharp contrast to last year's meeting in Davos which was overwhelmed by the acrimonious confrontation that flared up between the US and some of its European allies most notably France and Germany in the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq. Uncharacteristically, Cheney extended an olive branch to Washington's European allies at this year's Davos meeting.
Cheney made great play of the healing of the rift and reconciliation among Western allies. "There is not the venom or aggressiveness that was there six months or a year ago," noted Richard Haas, president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
"The trans-Atlantic friction is over," trumpeted Stefano Sannino, senior adviser to European Commission President Romano Prodi. "Cheney's speech showed continuity, after all he is the architect of the foreign policy of America's neo- conservatives," observed Thierry de Montbrial, president of the French Institute for International Relations. "But there is an interesting change in tone," de Montbrial added. "With smoother language and no mention of rogue states."
Strangely enough, the most scathing critique of Cheney and US foreign policy came from billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros who lambasted the "Orwellian double speak", of both Bush and Cheney whose policies he said were undermining the "democratic foundations of an open society", in the US and around the world.
