We draw your attention to an excellent article published by IP Watch, regarding intellectual property rights and their consideration in the upcoming UNCTAD XIII Conference in Doha. Leaving aside for the time being the continuing controversy regarding UNCTAD’s remit with respect to IP, not to mention a host of other important policy considerations on regulatory balance and other areas (we will come back to this in the next week), it is useful to note that UNCTAD XIII is just one more setting where the developing countries have a different view regarding IP than does the developed countries establishment. Simply put, the developing countries regard IP, Foreign Direct Investment and Trade and Development considerations to be intertwined, and hence policies regarding them should be developed accordingly. This view while not expressly stated in the position paper presented by the Group of 77 plus China, is apparent in an appeal for balance between public interest and private privilege. The LDC position is more explicit, with an appeal to more liberal technology transfer through reference to the TRIPS provisions of WTO rules. Perhaps most forceful is the relevant statement coming from the BRICS at the close of their Delhi conference in late March, which was very supportive of the developing country views.

So UNCTAD XIII will meet in Doha this week, from 21-26 April, with “Development-centred Globalization: Towards inclusive and sustainable growth and development” as its theme. The outcomes document is already in preparation but in its current form it is a negotiating text with lots of bracketed items, to be marked up and altered during the conference. We will watch with great interest how IP issues are resolved (or not).

The WTO Committee on Trade, Finance and Debt held a closed workshop on Exchange Rates and Trade on 27-28 March, but then posted most of the presentations, the background paper and the speech of the Director-General on the WTO website (available here).  NGOs were given a follow-up briefing as well.  The workshop, requested by the government of Brazil, was deemed a success in terms of providing a forum for informed exchanges of research and perspectives from the private sector, public sector, international financial institutions and academia.  Private sector representatives shared their contrasting experiences from Switzerland, showing how exchange rate fluctuations can be managed on the one hand, and South Africa and Brazil, showing how difficult it is for some companies to do so on the other, while others chimed with their views on each side.  The thrust of the research suggested that exchange rates may produce misalignment but that they are usually not persistent.   The relationships are affected by the structure of trade, the size of trade, the size of the company involved and access to hedging facilities.  We understand that the basic messages were that trade policy measures won’t correct the imbalances where there is no international monetary system, that policy coherence at home to enhance competitiveness is the best policy to protect against exchange rate fluctuations and that there needs to be in any case better cooperation between the WTO and the IMF.  Future work of the Committee may also include a study of WTO rules to determine their applicability to exchange rate manipulation and of course, continuing debate about the impact of international monetary policy on trade.

And then as somewhat of a surprise, on 13 April the People’s Bank of China announced a relaxation of the daily trading band restrictions for the yuan against the dollar, from +/- 0.5 percent to +/- 1.0 percent.  The consequence of this action, of course, falls into the category of policy coherence at home being used to allow for more exchange rate fluctuations, albeit within the time constraint of a single day.  But the common wisdom is that in this case the fluctuations will be predominately in the direction of strengthening the yuan against the dollar, thus moving to negate an imbalance that has long been a sore point in trade relations between the US and China.

The Special Rapporteur on the Right To Food, Olivier de Schutter (Belgium) appeared before the Human Rights Council to present his latest report (see 27 February CMBD News) and for members of the Council to respond.   The Rapporteur referred to concerns raised in his report about malnutrition not being just a lack of food but of consuming the wrong kinds of foods.  He argued for a right to food rich in nutrients and diversity and criticized the globalization of food as being responsible for both malnutrition and obesity.   He had also reported on visits to China, Madagascar, South Africa and Mexico, and these members of the Council responded first.  The Chinese and South African representatives were very critical and argued that the Rapporteur had his facts wrong.  Similarly, the US criticized the reporting for incomplete economic and social analysis and incorrect policy prescriptions.  The EU was perhaps gentler in suggesting that there were positive benefits from private sector interventions to improve nutrition.  In general, the rest of the discussion focused on how countries were addressing efforts to improve nutrition, while a number of interventions, including one from the WHO, also focused on the specific benefits of breast-feeding for healthy nutritional development.  There is a draft resolution on the right to food presented by Cuba that is being discussed this week.  The resolution has been introduced before, and it does include a very broad array of proposals, many of which are very general.  We will continue to report on this.

At the plenary of the Human Rights Council meetings late last month, panelists had established that there was no need for any new human rights standards on freedom of expression; that the existing standards in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (Article 19) were written to anticipate “any means” of communication. The only new element of the Internet is that it is interactive in real time. Challenges are mounting, though, especially with censorship by governments, as raised by the Google executive, but also with the role of the state to protect individuals from interference of their other fundamental rights as well as protection from criminalization. Some even suggested that a new set of rules might be needed, in spite of the adequacy of the basic standards, to address such issues as the right to development and cultural diversity, or establishing a global mechanism against censorship or filtering. As for a business role, references were made to voluntary corporate standards in the Global Network Initiative, the Internet Coalition, and the Silicon Valley Standard. The Turkish delegate provided some clarity by suggesting there were two issues – first the elementary issue of access, where the Turkish government has been partnering with the private sector to place computers in every school to ensure access; and secondly, to ensure freedom of expression itself through a legal framework to tighten definitions and restrictions for exceptions. There seemed to be widespread acceptance of the Google position that intermediaries should not be liable to regulate content, and many delegates spoke about working together against censorship.

China’s delegate contributed to the debate with an intervention that was endorsed by some twenty other Council members, and that emphasized the need to balance the right to freedom of expression with other fundamental economic and social rights including specific articles of international law against the undermining of the rights of others – those that protect others from speech that is inflammatory, criminal, corrupt or disruptive of cultural values. There continued to be an ebb and flow of ideas about how to apply existing interpretations for balancing these rights with the fundamental right to freedom of expression and who should be called upon to assume greater responsibilities. Several delegates referred to an important private sector role for this, while the Google executive reiterated the importance of a common platform or code. One delegate spoke about the importance of agreeing on how NOT to control the web and the need to answer the question WHO has the right to regulate what aspects of it. Finally, the issues of how much information might be legitimately accumulated by Internet providers and how to protect copyright and trademark and related intellectual property rights were touched on but not prominently featured in the debate. But this is only the beginning of the Human Rights Council’s role in this area, and we can certainly expect further deliberations and resolutions to define an expanded role for human rights impact assessments in Internet policy debates, codes and other mechanisms, whether they are at the Council or at the Internet Governance Forum or the follow-up process to the World Summit for the Information Society or at the International Telecommunications Union or even the UN General Assembly.

A recent report on China’s economy piqued our interest, not only because of its title “China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious and Creative High-Income Society” but also because of its authors.  See the report here.  The title has a certain Confucian ring to it.  The intriguing fact about the report is that it was co-authored by the World Bank and the Development Research Center of China’s State Council and included a series of bold reform proposals.  The outgoing World Bank President Bob Zoellick opened a conference in Beijing on the report by suggesting that China has done well to move so rapidly into the status of an “upper middle income” economy (in the Bank’s categories of levels of economic standing) but will need to change its economic strategies significantly if it is going to reach the top category as a “high income” economy by 2030.  Mr. Zoellick basically said that the export and investment driven strategies that have worked so well for China so far cannot produce a continued growth rate in the future.  Rather, the strategy needs to shift to the expansion of domestic demand through higher consumption, innovation, economic efficiency and social inclusion.  This last is especially important to combat the chronic and increasingly serious rural/urban divide and income equality gap.  Thus, the report recommends reforms to strengthen the private sector and the market economy, to increase the pace of open innovation, to pursue a green growth strategy, to improve opportunities and services for health, education and jobs, to reform the domestic fiscal system and to connect more fully to the international economy.   The media buzz is very much driven by the fact that the report was co-authored by an entity associated with the Chinese political leadership, although there is also speculation that this is merely setting the stage for the change in leadership that is expected to happen in China later this year.  Meanwhile, the Chinese have also announced a modest slowdown in the economic growth forecast for 2012 but also a big increase in defense spending.