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Corporate role, agenda issues cloud forum
Saturday, May 22, 1999
By BRUCE RAMSEY
When business leaders promised to raise $9.2 million to persuade the World Trade Organization to meet in Seattle this year, they also launched the meeting's first controversy: corporate money's effect on government decisions.
But that fight is merely an opening skirmish in a larger battle bound to occupy the trade organization and its critics well beyond the conference set for Nov. 30-Dec. 3.
The bigger question is should governments focus on trade and investment as values in themselves? Or should they subordinate those to concerns about labor, human rights and the environment?
The WTO was formed to focus on trade, with an aim of increasing trade by promoting uniform rules among nations. The meeting at Seattle will bring together trade ministers to discuss rules on such things as agriculture and services.
Through the WTO, governments bind themselves to certain treatment of foreign products and investors, and agree to submit their decisions, when challenged, to WTO review. Nationalist, populist and environmental groups object to such negotiations because they reduce governments' discretion in setting local rules about things as precious as human rights or the environment.
The early argument over the so-called "Seattle Round" revolved around a March 15 fund-raising letter from Lawrence Clarkson, the chief fund-raiser for the Seattle Host Organization. The letter said, in part: "The Seattle Host Organization is committed to ensuring that the private sector is an integral part of the events surrounding the Ministerial. We are working very closely with USTR (the office of the U.S. Trade Representative) and WTO every step of the way to coordinate schedules and venues to maximize interaction between officials and the private sector."
The letter offered donors seats at a conference here in July at which "the private sector will meet with senior U.S. trade officials to discuss priorities for the upcoming Round."
Pate Felts, assistant U.S. trade representative, rebuked the Seattle organizers. "The statement could be read to suggest that by virtue of their contributions, certain firms or individuals will gain privileged access to U.S. government policy-makers," he wrote. It's OK for businesspeople to meet with policy makers, he wrote, but he said, "we do not, and will not, premise those meetings on contributions. . . ."
Ray Waldmann, a Boeing executive who heads the Seattle Host Organization, said: "We've canceled that July event. We're not going to do that. We learned." He added, "It was too ambitious, anyway."
The Seattle Host Organization still plans a ministerial dinner and two receptions, one at the beginning of the WTO conference and one at the end. Companies that donate $250,000, as did The Boeing Co. and Microsoft Corp., will get five tickets to each event. Donors of lesser amounts will get fewer tickets, and those donating less than $25,000 merely get to display corporate materials.
And that's reasonable, Waldmann said. "As long as I have been at Boeing, these meetings have been paid for by the private sector," he said. "The way you get the private sector to do that is you allow a few members of the supporting companies to attend the events."
He added, "It would be nice if companies out of the generosity of their hearts would give us a $250,000 check and not expect anything in return. But what we are giving in return is well within the accepted bounds."
Waldmann said the receptions will include non-paying guests from governments, the media and maybe even the Sierra Club. All these guests will be in a big crowd. A ticket holder might have a chance to buttonhole a dignitary, but there's no guaranteed access. "If a government minister doesn't want to talk to somebody, he doesn't have to," Waldmann said.
Besides, he said, a company that can donate $250,000 doesn't need to buy access. It can call a trade minister's office and get an appointment.
Dan Seligman, director of the Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Campaign, first raised the issue in the Financial Times. Seligman said he is glad the Seattle committee canceled its July conference, but argued that a problem remains with any private funding.
"When you have private money funding major government functions, inevitably the playing field gets skewed to favor the funders," he said. "I think this should be a government summit, paid for by an appropriation from the federal government. That way, Boeing will not have a special claim on the negotiators that the Sierra Club does not have."
Jay Ziegler, spokesman for the U.S. trade representative, said, "There will be no special treatment for the businesses that participate in the host committee."
But the WTO, in the Sierra Club's view, amounts to special treatment of business as a whole. The club has a list of regulations that it favors that were modified or struck down by the WTO. Those include Europe's ban on hormone-treated beef, which was struck down as unscientific, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's standards for gasoline, which were ruled to be discriminatory against foreign refiners. In the WTO's view, the regulations were trade barriers in green clothing; in the club's view, they were good laws.
"The WTO is becoming a kind of stealth anti-EPA," Seligman said.
The Sierra Club is promoting a "green trade agenda" that would turn the WTO into a force for requiring higher environmental and labor standards. That agenda is why environmentalists went public over the issue of private funding. It raises the issue who benefits from the WTO.
The U.S. government, which takes the position that the country as a whole benefits, says its reason for private funding is to save the taxpayers money. It raised money the same way with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Seattle in 1993, the Summit of the Americas in Miami in 1994, the G-8 meeting in Denver in 1997, the International Telecommunications Union meeting in Minneapolis earlier this year and the NATO summit just concluded in Washington, D.C.
Other governments don't do it that way. Yoshio Nomoto, Japan's consul general in Seattle, said in a recent meeting: "In Japan, our central government is involved, and we pay. We not only direct it, we do it. In America, Washington, D.C., expects the local people to do many things. This is the American way."
"It would be nice if the federal government did it," said Pat Davis executive director of the Washington Council on International Trade, the sponsoring agency of the Seattle Host Committee. "Then we wouldn't have to go through all this."
She added, "But life is not free."
P-I reporter Bruce Ramsey can be reached at 206-448-8391 or bruceramsey@seattle-pi.com
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