The Group 110 is born

World united against USA and EU

One hundred and ten countries are united in the G110, a grouping of the world's middle and lower income developing nations. These countries ask for one thing, and one thing only – that the United States of America and the European Union practise what they preach.

The USA and EU claim to represent free and fair trading practices and speak about the importance of the market-based economy in the capitalist model. What they practise is something entirely different, namely cloistered and interventionist trading practises which protect their own market against those countries trying to compete with them.

It is the antithesis of the capitalist-monetarist model which proves clearly that the model is flawed from the outset. After complaining for decades about the controlled economy and state interventionism in economic cycles, which was the case of the Soviet economic model, Washington and Brussels do exactly the same thing.

Hero

The hero of the day is the Brazilian Foreign Minister, Celso Amorim, the leader of the G20 group of middle income developing countries who has managed to forge a common stance with the lower-income developing countries, forming a strong block of 110 nations – the G110.

Anti-heroes

The anti-heroes are Washington (as is the norm) and now the EU, who both spend their time and energies in the WTO talks in Hong Kong blaming the other party for intransigence.

Neither are prepared to make any concessions and aim to retain the system of subsidies for their own producers, keeping them in work and artificially bringing down the price of the commodity, and tariffs on imports, meaning that goods produced in developing countries have an artificially high price.

These are not the principles of free and fair trade, these are not the principles of a free market, these are not the principles of a market-based economy.

Goodbye Gleneagles

Our worst nightmares about Gleneagles are now well founded, six months after the G8 Summit in Scotland made pledges to end world poverty and to commit the more developed nations to helping the less developed countries. In practice, there is no movement whatsoever and so we finish 2005 the same way that we had started: the world is at an impasse.

The rich have and the poor have not. That is how the rich want things to stay and that is how things will be under this current economic model. In short, it doesn't work.

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