It is interesting how the coalitions of the willing and the wanting shift.
When it comes to negotiations on ecological globalisation -- conventions from climate change to biodiversity protection -- the powers almost always align as follows: on one side, the US flanked by its partners (Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand); on the other, the European Union (EU), supported willingly or hesitatingly by developing countries.
But when it comes to negotiations on economic globalisation, the chessboard changes. In most cases, trade negotiators from developing countries find the US full of empathy for their concerns, while the EU is seen as protectionist, mean and antagonistic to developing country aspirations for a larger share of world trade.
Why does this happen? After all, negotiations on a fairer world are negotiations for a more sustainable world. Could it be that we have not forcefully articulated our position - that the brown (development) and the green (environment) agenda are integrated for us? That we are not part of a world made dysfunctional by the separation of business and right livelihoods?
Take agriculture, on the agenda of the World Trade Organisation ministerial meet in Cancun in September. That the global trade system is rigged against farmers in the developing world is accepted by the most fervent free-trade advocates.
Hypocrisy compounds outrage here; the US and the EU have systematically unlocked our markets for their industrial goods and services, but have not reciprocated when it comes to opening up their farming sector - an arena we can compete in.
Economic globalisation has thus become a one-way street. The industrialised world spends an astronomical $1 billion a day on subsidies to the farming sector. Just think, a European cow nets an average of $2 a day on subsidy alone. And as with most global negotiations, the EU and the US have aligned and their joint initiative announced just days before Cancun.
In this unequal world, the issue of equal standards -- on environment, health and technical parameters -- becomes a contentious one. Sanitary and phytosanitary standards, imposed by the rich world for its public health purposes, are seen as a camouflage for trade restrictions.
For instance, Germany rejects a consignment of Indian tea. It is found to contain excessive levels of pesticide. Tetradifon (a pesticide the Germans produced and later banned) was detected at levels higher-than-EU standards, but within the limit prescribed by the US.
A further twist: the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which fixes benchmark specifications, has no standard for Tetradifon.
So: is the German ban about health, or politics? Indian officials argue that tea meets the standards set in the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954, but do not explain that we have no standards for this pesticide residue. Without data from India on pesticide safety limits -- generated by responsible science and hard research -- this was, and will be, a losing battle.
I think we must fight this battle differently. In many cases, the standards that industrialised world sets are unfair and unattainable. But it is to realise we cannot hide behind that excuse called poverty anymore.
Standards set for public health purposes are important. Not just for the rich of the world, but more so for the poor. It is entirely in our interest to attack the cause, reduce contamination; we are too poor to grapple with the outcome, the crippling double burden of disease.
We need to articulate this and demand that the terms of negotiation change. Firstly, poor farmers compete in a world of overproduction because of heavily subsidised products.
They over-work the land, over-fertilise it, over-use pesticide - all to increase production. They devalue the land and their labour to compete with unfair terms of trade.
In other words, global markets do not allow them to capture the ecological costs of what they produce. Therefore, sustainable agriculture is not possible, without removing distorting subsidies in the North. Nobody can tell us otherwise.
Secondly, developing country governments are spending too little on domestic support -- unlike rich governments - to create rural infrastructure for water security and biodiversity security, both critical to sustainable agriculture. We have to spend more, not less, on agriculture.
Thirdly, while the world trading system rewards the inventor through the patent system, it does nothing to penalise the same inventor if the product is found to be toxic or environmentally damaging.
If inventors of products need incentives (patents), they also need disincentives (liability) so that they do hard and long-term research before rushing to the market.
As we go to Cancun, we need to make it clear that for us, development and environment go hand and hand. But we want less free-trade rhetoric. And we definitely want less hypocrisy, particularly from the EU. They must make their environmental agenda match their development agenda. Just as we have.