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Yaounde (Cameroon): The Narendra Modi government’s repeated claims of being “leader” and “voice” of the Global South is going to face another test at the World Trade Organization’s 14th ministerial conference today, amid a grave challenge from the United States to transform the multilateral trade body into a “bilateral and plurilateral” frame work.

Such a framework, according to the United States Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer will ensure “the benefits will accrue to those partners – not to free riders or countries that undermine fair, market-oriented competition,”  a move that could disenfranchise the WTO countries from any role in the WTO.

In several global forums, including the G20 Summits, Modi has emphasised that India represents the concerns of developing nations that are often underrepresented in global decision-making. He has stated that India’s presidency of the G20 is guided by the principle of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (One Earth, One Family, One Future),” with a clear focus on amplifying the priorities of the Global South.

The 14th Ministerial Conference (MC14) in Yaoundé, Cameroon on March 26-29, will be the test of India’s leadership of Global South. The main agenda items of MC14 where India will be needed to safeguard the interests of Indian citizens as well as people of the Global South include the e-commerce moratorium, WTO reforms; agriculture and fisheries, and plurilateral agreements.

A recent Draft Ministerial Decision on Electronic Transmission by the US and other 18 countries seeks to make the Moratorium on Electronic Transmissions permanent, including the ‘content of the transmission’ in the scope of the Moratorium. This can be extremely dangerous for India as well as the Global South.

With artificial intelligence (AI) being delivered through electronic transmissions and used across all services, including IT, financial, professional, healthcare, and education services, moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions does not only lead to huge potential revenue losses for the Global South but can pose critical national security concerns as well as seal the dominance of exporters of AI transmissions like US, China, Germany, South Korea and France over the Global South.

Developing AI capabilities has become a necessary condition and is no longer a policy choice for countries like India. India is rapidly losing its export competitiveness in coding services as these services are being replaced by AI. Algorithms are becoming important and need to be regulated. There is a need to apply customs duties on electronic transmissions from cloud platforms like Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services, in order to provide level playing field to infant digital economies of Global South.

India has played a leadership role along with South Africa and Indonesia in preventing making the moratorium permanent in the past and it has again opposed it in its recent statements. But India needs become a leader and build coalitions with other developing countries like Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and other key African countries, and take this opportunity in MC14 to remove the moratorium.

Another issue where India has played a key role in the past and needs to prove its mettle as a leading voice of Global South is the issues in agriculture and fisheries. India needs to build coalitions to force a permanent solution to its long pending issue of public stockholding (PSH) for food security. India’s food procurement system – built on minimum support prices and public distribution – feeds millions and sustains farmers. However, current WTO rules cap subsidies at 10% of production value, calculated using outdated price benchmarks from the 1980s. India has consistently demanded a permanent solution that would protect its food programs from legal challenges. For India, this is not merely a trade issue but a question of livelihood and survival.

Closely linked is the demand for a Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM), which would allow developing countries to raise tariffs temporarily in response to import surges or price crashes. Indian policymakers argue that without such tools, small and marginal farmers remain exposed to volatile global markets, especially with the probability of a global food crisis on the horizon due to shortages of oil with the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran.

India is advocating for a broader reform of agricultural subsidy rules, which it sees as skewed in favour of developed nations which provide billions of dollars of subsidies to its farmers under Green Box. It is also supporting efforts to revive the WTO’s dispute settlement system, which has weakened in recent years, to ensure fairness and enforceability in global trade. However, India alone cannot make progress on these issues, It will have to build allies and become a leader of Global South to push for these reforms.

The recent communication from the US on March 23 on ‘Further Perspectives on the WTO Reforms’ clearly shows the that US has built alliances with other advanced countries like the EU and UK, and is again playing the leadership role to undermine the preferences which Global South has earned through long and hard negotiations at the WTO and by giving up its policy space in many areas in favour of export interests of developed countries.

India needs to build its own alliances and become a voice of Global South in opposing the attack on the core principles of the WTO including the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) principle and Special and Differential Treatment (SDT) for the developing countries. US has already deviated from MFN principle by levying unilateral tariffs, which has led to utter chaos in the developing economies and international trading system. Any deviation from the MFN principle would amount to giving supremacy to developed countries over Global South with weakened bargaining power.

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Similar to MFN, SDT is also a core development principle of WTO and any attack on it will be equivalent to diluting development space in the international trading system. Developed countries have long preached developing countries to use trade as an engine of growth. However, attacking SDT is like using trade as an end to itself and not means to develop. Self-declaration of development status is needed by countries like India as only they know about vulnerabilities of their exporters. No criteria can be used to determine the development status. Even the United Nations is advocating ‘going beyond GDP’ and using multidimensional measures to understand the vulnerabilities of developing countries.

Further, India also needs to lead the Global South in terms of building a strong opposition to mainstreaming the plurilateral agreements like the Joint Statement Initiatives into the WTO. While US argues that WTO risks irrelevance if this is not done, however, if these plurilateral agreements are brought into the WTO, it will put an end to multilateralism and the WTO. These agreements not only go against the consensus decision-making of the WTO but propagate the will of powerful countries over the weaker countries. WTO was established to fight such power asymmetries.

The way US is taking the lead in killing the core principles of the WTO, which becomes clearer by the March 23 statement of the US, and turning it into a vehicle of the advanced countries for dominating the Global South, India also needs to take up its leadership role in the Global South and stop the US and other advanced countries from progressing in their motives. At this juncture, India has the responsibility of protecting its vulnerable farmers, fishermen and SMEs. It should not be protecting the interest of few big Indian firms which look up to the US for their future growth and profits.

Ravi Kanth Devarakonda is a financial journalist based in Switzerland.

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