“Tidbits From TNT” Tuesday Morning 7-16-2024

TNT:

Tishwash:  Iraq resumes negotiations to join WTO

 Minister of Trade and head of the Iraqi team concerned with joining the World Trade Organization, Athir Dawood Al-Ghariri, announced on Monday the resumption of negotiations to join the World Trade Organization, after a hiatus that lasted more than 16 years.

A statement by the ministry, seen by "Al-Eqtisad News", quoted the Director General of the Department of Foreign Economic Relations, Riyadh Fakher Al-Hashemi, as saying that "the Iraqi negotiating teams have begun their preparatory meetings at the headquarters of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, in preparation for the third meeting of the working group on Iraq's accession."

Al-Hashemi added that "the first preparatory meeting was held at the organization's headquarters with the Director of the Accession Department and the organization's experts in goods, services and intellectual property, headed by the Director General of the Department of Economic Relations and the membership of negotiators representing the Iraqi ministries and the Kurdistan Region; to discuss the most important files and documents submitted by Iraq in the previous stage." 

He pointed out that "the third official meeting of the working group, which will be headed by the Minister of Trade representing Iraq, will witness a review of the files and documents completed by the National Committee concerned with accession."

He continued, "This is the first time that the Iraqi negotiating team has reached this level of experience in the field of negotiation, which reflects the development of their capabilities and efficiency in dealing with complex issues related to WTO membership  link

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Pros and cons of Iraq joining the WTO

Appearance of Mohammed Saleh

Since 2003, Iraq has adopted broad open policies towards the world and sought to establish important economic and legislative rules that operate according to the mechanisms of the market system, most of which helped improve Iraq’s foreign trade, after an economic blockade that lasted for more than a decade and led to Iraq’s marginalization on the map of the global economic system and deprived it of investment opportunities, progress, development and technological knowledge that should have helped it confront the rapid developments and changes that international markets have witnessed and whose competitive capabilities have changed dramatically over the past two decades at least.

Thus, Iraq became isolated from its international environment in the midst of a world swept by the currents of merging its companies, liberalizing its markets and integrating them, especially the financial ones, and the dominance of the new liberal doctrine, which required broad economic transformations in the field of information technology that became in harmony with the internationalism of productive activity through the role that multinational companies began to play and the increasing competitive advantage of the products that the world markets began to generate.

However, we find in the integration of financial markets, whose assets exceed $850 trillion, the main title of financial globalization and the main focus of dominance in the globalization of the new liberal economy. At the same time, it represents the trend of transition in the axes of international trade and the introduction to the transformation from the scope of the GATT Agreement signed in 1948 to the World Trade Organization Agreement (WTO), where the latter focused on regulating a wide range of trade in services, especially financial services, whose annexes were called the GATS Agreement in 1994 based on the Uruguay Round.

While the gross domestic product of the world's 192 economies does not exceed $83 trillion annually at present (and the value of world trade in goods and services has also not increased annually by more than a third of the aforementioned global output), we find that trade in currency conversion, speculation, and short-term capital movements exceeds about $4.5 trillion daily in international monetary and financial markets, a speculative financial trade whose annual total exceeds more than fifty times the total global trade in goods and services.

In the midst of these changes in the international commercial and financial space, Iraq has moved to important organizational levels in the transition to a market economy to break the effects of its international isolation by engaging in a strong area of ​​economic liberalism that focused on liberalizing the areas of Iraq's foreign trade in goods and services and the means of financing them, despite the fluctuations in its organization.

As well as the development and expansion of areas of progress achived in some financial services and improving the environment for foreign investment through the legislation of the banking and investment laws and the Central Bank Law, which allows foreign banks to operate in Iraq and allows the transfer of capital and currency in a manner that serves Iraq's openness to the world in the conditions of a central rentier economy that is difficult to deal with in understanding market liberalism, which nevertheless led to providing positive opportunities and promising legal and organizational foundations for the Iraqi business environment.

However, all of this is not enough to put Iraq on the path of international economic competition. There are still more than five thousand legislative texts that hinder economic freedom and market activity, which are being studied by legal circles and which must be amended so that Iraq can integrate into international trade and investment and prepare it to join the World Trade Organization according to the terms of membership in it so that our country can obtain the most-favored nation status and the principle of national treatment.

However, the paradoxes of joining revolve around the issues of oil and agriculture, in addition to other problems of joining.

While oil sector production dominates nearly 50% of Iraq’s GDP, the sector employs only 2% of the Iraqi workforce, and the country’s crude oil exports and revenues constitute the near-absolute majority of total exports, general budget revenues, and foreign exchange earnings.

 In light of all this, the World Trade Organization excludes crude oil as a commodity within the group of raw commodities traded internationally, which remains the core of the contradiction in Iraq’s accession to that organization that excludes crude oil. If the World Trade Organization had allowed oil to be taken into account, the price would have been determined by global supply and demand, away from the cartel or consumer groups represented by the International Energy Agency and its lines and programs for rationalizing demand for oil. Or away from the cartel or producer groups represented by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its role in regulating production and influencing prices, which is the matter that imposed price and quantity restrictions on a commercial commodity, but a strategic and political one at the same time, which is the driving force of Iraq’s foreign trade.

On the other side of the Iraqi economy, we find the agricultural sector, which includes less than a third of the Iraqi population and about 22% of the Iraqi labor force, and does not contribute to the gross domestic product except by a percentage not exceeding 5%, which made the country a near-net importer of food or agricultural goods, the value of which exceeds 14 billion dollars annually. This important sector, which has been subjected to militarization and neglect over the past thirty years and more, does not have the sufficient components to provide food security in terms of grains or agricultural production requirements after the shrinkage of productive agricultural areas due to desertification, salinization, and the recent water crisis, which eliminated more than 50% of the lands prepared for agriculture, in addition to the deterioration of the agricultural infrastructure, 83% of whose components are controlled by the state as a public commodity.

Here the agricultural sector contradicts the oil sector structurally in the directions of openness to the global market and with two different wings in terms of the impact of commercial benefits and costs. The forces of the international market or global supply and demand have come to control strongly, whether in the demand for oil and its impact on the value of Iraqi exports or in the supply of food products and its impact on the cost of Iraq’s imports from them.

When referring to the philosophy of reducing customs restrictions by 24% and abolishing non-customs restrictions, which are the conditions imposed by the World Trade Organization on the member state in the group of developing countries to work with and implement them within a period of six years from the date of accession, in addition to reducing agricultural support by 13.3% within a period of ten years from accession

We find that these regulatory conditions of the World Trade Organization clash with the conditions and situations of the agricultural market and the global food stock exchange itself. If we look at the agricultural monopolies in the world in light of the deterioration of agricultural development in Iraq, we find a real threat to national food security that restricts the country in the event of joining the organization unless it is preceded by starting or following an agricultural program for self-sufficiency immediately.

We will really need a green revolution similar to what Mexico and many Latin American countries have done. Especially if we know that there are between 3 to 6 major monopolistic companies in the world that control 80 to 90% of agricultural crop trade and control prices and quantities such as wheat, sugar, tea, coffee, cotton, jute, etc. At a time when ten multinational companies still control a third of the world's seed and pesticide production and trade.

Despite the above, Iraq’s entry and integration into the global economic space through the World Trade Organization and its dealings with international groups on terms that apply to everyone from a formal standpoint at a time when the world is still divided between the countries of the North and the South or the countries of the advanced industrial center and the developing periphery, Iraq has no choice but to leave its international isolation that it inherited since the blockade that began in 1990, which placed Iraq under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter or its aftermath, a chapter whose effects still provide a negative economic environment hostile to development and perhaps obstructing natural integration into the global market.

This chapter prohibits levels of investment in advanced technology or easy dealings with the world due to the restrictions it imposes on our country as a high-risk country that threatens world peace and allows the use of force against it in a regrettable legacy for the civilization of Mesopotamia despite the disappearance of the objective reasons for which the economic blockade was imposed on Iraq.

Noting that Iraq's accession to regional economic zones, such as the Greater Arab Free Trade Area and other economic agreements within the framework of the Arab League or other forms of regional integration and consolidation, must take into account the implementation of the provisions contained in the World Trade Organization Agreement and before it the GATT Agreement, both of which have become binding restrictions on the implementation of trade agreements. Thus, any trade facilitations within the framework of regional agreements become useless or worthless if they are less than the facilitations provided within the framework of the World Trade Organization.

Finally, Iraq's continued isolation from its international environment will cost it a lot due to the loss of organizational advantages and opportunities, technological and legal benefits, and other areas of investment and arbitration, which are opportunities that isolation from the world does not provide and does not enable a gradual transformation into a group of stable and low-risk countries, a transformation that encourages international cooperation in a secure global investment and trade environment, provided that effective development begins based on the strong push program.  link

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