SCRI Annual Report 2003/2004 - Scottish Crop Research Institute

Director’s Report
Globalisation Globalisation created tensions in those
anxious to sustain national sovereignty, preferences
and prejudices, culture, and independence.
Institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, and WTO
were subject to protests, sometimes violent in nature
by those resentful of their influence, and who claimed
that such institutions were unresponsive to domestic
civil society and tended to be secretive. Protestors
demonstrated at the WTO meeting in Seattle in
November 1999, the IMF and World Bank meeting in
Washington in April 2000, at the World Economic
Forum in Melbourne on 11 September 2000, and at
the Prague Summit Meeting of the World Bank and
IMF on 26 September 2000. 2000-2001.
Globalisation To some, globalisation is an undesirable
manifestation of the spread of international capitalism
from the more-developed countries (MDCs), but
mainly from the G-7 nations, reinforced by the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank,
and the WTO. Free choice, the uptake and exploitation
of technologies that improve efficiency and reliability,
the free flow of information, the operation of
free markets and individual choice which can develop
the common good, and lightweight governance, will
inexorably favour globalisation. Competition and the
deployment of profit for social progress drive improvements,
as do enlightened democratic processes that
quell corruption and support strong legal systems.
Opponents of globalisation, many of whom wished to
target inequality, often presented feeble and dubious
arguments which were couched in anti-business, antimixed-economy,
anti-American, anti-technology, anticapitalism
terms and were based on the application of
excessive market-distorting regulations, trade barriers,
and taxation. International economic integration has
become an anathema to others who wish to resist the
loss of cultural diversity. Yet foreign direct investments
(FDIs) affect both the providing (outward) and
recipient (inward) economies, sometimes seemingly
adversely in the short term, but almost without exception
there are net benefits for consumers, government
taxation returns, and the higher-paid workers appointed
to the new enterprises. Technologies are taken up
quickly. According to the Economist (29 September –
5 October 2001), in these early stages of globalisation
most outward FDIs tend to create exports and represent
net complements because affiliates of multinational
companies trade with each other. Many have noted
that longer-term capital contributes to economic
growth in emerging markets. Whereas there is little
evidence that bank loans and trade credits contribute
to higher gross domestic product (GDP), for every 10
percentage point rise in the ratio of FDI stock to the
economy, GDP rises by 4%. Clearly, and perhaps
controversially, free trade should properly go hand-inhand
with mobility of appropriate labour. 2000-2001.
WTO Representation Included in the criticism of the
IMF and World Bank is the WTO, an organisation
specifically mandated to promote international trade.
Some believed erroneously that it overrode democracies
through newly applied international quasi-judicial
routes and was both unaccountable and unrepresentative.
Yet the WTO is wholly intergovernmental, operating
solely by consensus. All 142 members, soon to
be joined by China after its 15-year quest, have a veto.
The dispute-resolution rules were agreed unanimously,
and require objective and open analyses, rather than
subjective imposition. Small nations can participate
actively in the struggles between the main trading
blocs. With time, it is expected that the secrecy
attached to trade negotiations will have to go, even
though governments currently insist on the control of
information. Eventually, politically tender areas of
trade viz.: agriculture, textiles, exploitation of natural
resources such as minerals and forestry, and corporate
interests, look likely to be assimilated without special
protection measures in all the remaining areas of trading
interchange. 2000-2001.
Agricultural Trade Trade liberalisation fostered by the
WTO did not extend to matters agricultural, following
the unproductive Seattle event in late 1999. Tradedistorting
subsidies were criticised by the Cairns
Group (Argentine, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile,
Colombia, Fiji, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand,
Paraguay, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, and
Uruguay), highlighting the extraordinary protectionist
measures adopted by the European Union, Japan, and
South Korea, mainly on the basis that agriculture provides
indirect, difficult-to-quantify benefits such as
visual amenity, food security, and rural cultures. A raft
of production-related subsidies, export credit and credit-guarantee
programmes, peripheral subsidies, and
import barriers seen in the protectionist countries is
associated with complex bureaucratic processes and
regressive attitudes to agriculture. Potential enlargement
of the EU to include agriculturally dependent
countries in Central and Eastern Europe would create
enormous pressures on the EU total budget unless substantial
reforms including subsidy downsizing were to
take place. 2000-2001.
WTO at Doha Despite the worsening economic situation,
or perhaps because of it, new agreements were
reached at the World Trade Organisation (WTO)
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