Part of the Cancun script could have been foretold, indeed was foretold. In the wake of Seattle and its angry street images of protest, corporate power players behind WTO adopted a populist tone and christened the next Doha Ministerial as the start of a 'development round' of trade talks. This was an acknowledgement that global trade talks could not just be a technical issue but had to be about fairness and ensuring well-being and growth prospects of the developing world. From the moment the Doha Meet ended, however, developed countries have done their utmost to backtrack on every one of the lofty commitments made there. Developing countries went to Cancun with a real sense of anger at this display of double standards and the anger came not just from the civil protesters but also from the governmental delegations.

From the outset, the dominant issue in Cancun came to be agriculture. Two separate issues were involved here: opening up the protected markets of USA, EU and Japan through reducing tariffs; and secondly, eliminating agricultural subsidies in developed countries which amount to more than 300 billion dollars a year. The most dramatic consequence of such high levels of subsidies is their depressing effect on world prices of key agricultural commodities such as cotton. Much of Africa has been devastated by the loss of income through such depressed world prices. Developing countries were determined to press home the demand for elimination of subsidies and reduction of agricultural tariffs. Brazil led the assault and African and Carribean LDCs won a rare success in projecting US subsidy on cotton as a critical concern. The voice of protesters too had a new edge; it was not just civil society activists who were on the streets but also actual producers. Ten thousand Mexican campesinos (peasants) descended on Cancun and a Korean farmer's leader became a martyr for the cause of a just trading order.

The corporate cabal which has so far dictated the WTO process tried every trick in their divide and rule policy to override this most legitimate of demands from the developing world. When this did not succeed, they brought the so-called Singapore Issues to the fore as a pressure ploy. These so-called Singapore Issues are all about extending WTO's rule-making jurisdiction to wholly new subjects such as foreign investment, competition policy, government procurement policy and trade facilitation policies. The first attempt to ram through a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) by the corporate world came in 1999 but it was successfully stopped by civic protests. For the lay person, it may appear counter-intuitive why investment should be such a red-herring for WTO debates. In reality, investment is merely the code-word for a policy offensive which will lay bare developing world economies to all categories of predatory capital flows which masquerade as investment and reduce government's ability to protect national interests. The playing field on the Singapore issues is a completely asymmetric one and agreeing on them at this stage would have effectively meant handing over developing world economies to the multinationals. At the last moment, the EU Trade Commissioner floated the idea of unbundling the Singapore issues, taking two of the four at this stage. To their credit, developing countries saw through the ploy and stood firm on not crossing this particular red line. South had refused to be browbeaten. North succeeded in derailing the talks and protecting their farm lobbies. Cancun became history.

And where was Bangladesh in all this? No one really expected Bangladesh to be an important player on its own. But as the supposed leader of LDCs, there were some expectations. Or were there? Local media had made much of the Dhaka declaration of May this year that emerged out of the LDC preparatory meeting attended by 25 of the 49 LDC countries and the concurrent civil society meeting organised by the Centre for Policy Dialogue. What had loomed large in the Dhaka headlines, however, scarcely made it into the Cancun script. For one, LDCs did not speak with one voice. Indeed, the only LDC voice which found a place in the Cancun headlines was that of African and Carribean countries who succeeded in getting the global spotlight on the cotton subsidy issue. The Dhaka declaration, a brainchild of the Commerce Ministry and the Centre for Policy Dialogue, was brutally exposed for what it was, an exercise in feel-good rhetoric. Nowhere was this more exemplified than in the so-called demand for right of movement of natural persons (unskilled labour). Beyond the feel-good inclusion in some text somewhere as was indeed going to be the case if there had been an agreement, what real operational potential is there for the pursuit of such a 'right' through the WTO process? In a post September 11 world where security considerations have come to dominate as never before, it is the domestic security policies which is determining the scope for such movements. This and the inventiveness and initiative of the common people. The more revealing statistic here is that neither September 11 nor the Iraq war has seen any slackening in the rate of external migration from Bangladesh.

If there was one lesson from Cancun for Bangladesh, it is that we cannot go far in trying to secure our advantages from global trade by relying on feel-good rhetoric. Dependence on 'cut-and-paste' advisers will only ensure that we become only a perplexed bystander at these crucial of global meetings. To its credit, however, when the ultimate moment came to stand up to the bullying of the corporate cabal, Bangladesh too was shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the developing world to say enough is enough.

The one big surprise at Cancun was the emergence of a new kid on the block, the so-called G21 grouping of developing countries led by countries like Brazil, India, China and Malaysia. In terms of the power politics of global trade, this has been a truly significant development. Little surprise that developed countries did their utmost to prevent the consolidation of such a bloc. It will be interesting to watch how and whether this bloc endures after Cancun. If it does signal a new capacity for collective action by developing countries, Bangladesh's long-term WTO future may lie in finding intelligent ways to link up with such a bloc.

If Seattle made anti-globalization fashionable, Cancun has demonstrated that the debate is really not one of for-and-against globalization. Countries like Bangladesh have as much a stake in improved trade access as does the developed world. The fight really is about what will dictate the globalization process. Will the narrow interests of a corporate cabal rule or will the diverse interests of ordinary peoples around the world hold the centre-stage? Easy victories are unlikely. Protesters cheered on the news of Cancun failure. The cheering was understandable in that South was not browbeaten into signing an unjust agreement. But the time for cheering may soon be past when the challenge of re-engaging on global trade talks is at the door. Cancun may have had no agreement. But the issues remain. The corporate strategists already had a game-plan for the post-Cancun world. If WTO proves too troublesome, go for bilateral and regional trade pacts. USA is already well ahead on this path: bilateral pacts with Chile and Singapore are already in offing within this year, Central America, Morocco, Australia next year. This is a real dilemma for the developing countries. A corporate-driven WTO is not welcome but the loss of multi-lateral space the WTO affords surely cannot be cause for cheer.

The developed world is not a uniformly monolithic front. In recent times, WTO has twice ruled against USA earning the ire of influential voices within the Bush administration. The mosaic of trade interests across the globe is a highly complex one except when it comes to 'red-line' issues such as GATS (General Agreement on Services), TRIP (trade-related intellectual property rights) and the so-called Singapore Issues. On these, the divide is really between North and South. Any attempt to re-open these in the run-up to the meeting of WTO bureaucrats scheduled for December must be fiercely resisted. But individual countries have also to attend to their specific trade interests. For countries like Bangladesh, the question is also not just about trade interests. How important is trade talks if you do not have sufficient items to trade in the first place? In this context, developing our product-base is as important a priority as looking for trade advantages. This will not happen if we ignore our domestic market. The export sector is something of a pampered child in Bangladesh. In contrast, the domestic sector is like the proverbial poor relative, just about tolerated. And yet, today's producers are tomorrow's exporters. Bangladesh cannot hope to gain from the WTO process by ignoring its own domestic producers, not just the business elite of Dhaka but the millions of producers and entrepreneurs struggling in the villages and the district towns to bring about a new economic reality.

Will the post-Cancun world be a free-for-all where WTO is fatally marginalized? Will the corporate cabal regroup and re-impose its writ on WTO on the safer shores of Geneva? Or does Cancun signal the beginning of a new WTO process, one ultimately more democratic and fruitful for the global economy. Nothing is pre-ordained. The future is ours to make.

Hossain Zillur Rahman is Executive Chairman, Power and Participation Research Centre