Obituary for Martin Khor - an undaunted fighter for the poor and underprivileged, a passionate believer in a more balanced and inclusive multilateralism
Obituary by Yilmaz Akyüz, Former Director, Globalization and Development Strategies Division, UNCTAD; and Former Chief Economist, South Centre, Geneva. Richard
Kozul-Wright, Director, Globalization and Development Strategies Division,
UNCTAD, Geneva.
Martin
was born in 1951 in colonial Malaysia, still under British rule, to a family of
journalists. After his primary and secondary education in Malaysia, he left for
the UK in 1971 to study at the University of Cambridge, where he obtained his
B.A Hons and M.A. in economics, before completing his second Masters in Social
Sciences at the University of Science, Malaysia in 1978. In his Master’s
thesis, he grappled with the changing nature of external dependence and surplus
extraction in Malaysia as it moved from colonial to post-colonial status, with
a view to its implications for the scope and limits of industrialization and
development; a study which left an indelible mark on his subsequent engagement
and activities in a world characterised by increasingly asymmetric power
relations.
He
started his professional career as an Administrative Officer at the Ministry of
Finance, Singapore before joining the University of Science, Malaysia as
lecturer in Economics in 1975.
Rethinking Globalization |
He
became the Research Director of The Consumers’ Association of Penang in 1978,
an independent non-profit international research and advocacy organization on
issues related to development. The Third World
Network (TWN) was created in 1984 at an international Conference on “The
Third World: Development and Crisis” organized by the Consumers’ Association of
Penang. In 1990, Martin became the Director of the TWN, perhaps the
most important NGO from the developing world with operations globally, both in
the North and the South, through offices, secretariats and researchers,
including in Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Geneva, Beijing, Delhi, Jakarta, Manila, New
York, Montevideo and Accra.
Martin
held both positions at the Consumers’ Association of Penang and the TWN until
2009 when he became the Executive Director of the South Centre in Geneva, an
intergovernmental organization of developing countries established in 1995 to
undertake research in various national and international development policy
areas and provide advice and support to developing countries in a variety of
international negotiating fora. Under his leadership, the South Centre
became an important voice in discussions on international trade and investment,
intellectual property, health, global macroeconomics, finance, sustainable
development, and climate change. During his tenure, the Centre extended
significantly the scope and quality of its policy research and advice, building
an enhanced reputation and level of trust among developing countries in the
struggles to protect and promote
their interests. After leaving the South Centre in 2018,
Martin returned to Penang, already suffering from cancer, and acted as Chairman
of the Board of TWN until his death on April 1, 2020.
Intellectual Property, Biodiversity and Sustainable Development |
Martin
was a staunch multilateralist but not an advocate of globalization, at least in
the neo-liberal guise it acquired from the early 1980s. On the one
hand, he was well aware that individually developing countries could not obtain
fair deals with major (and minor) developed countries in the international
economic system. On the other hand, he knew that multilateral rules and
practices were unbalanced, designed to subject developing countries to the
discipline of unfettered international markets shaped by transnational
corporations and self-seeking policies of dominant powers in the North, denying
them the kind of policy space they themselves had enjoyed in the course of
their industrialization. His efforts focussed on reshaping multilateral
rules and practices as a way to bring about systemic changes in the service of
development.
Martin
did this on three fronts. From the mid-1980s he focussed mainly on
international trade issues, particularly those raised by negotiations during
the Uruguay Round, and subsequently in the WTO and the proliferating free trade
agreements and bilateral investment treaties that accompanied the shift to a
neo-liberal international economic order. Martin was instrumental in bringing
the attention of policy makers and activists to the implications of new trade
rules for the industrialization and development of the Global South arising
from more demanding obligations on tariff and non-tariff measures, industrial
subsidies, investment and intellectual property rights. He made several
proposals for reform in these areas to remove imbalances and constraints over
industrialization, and economic diversification more generally, in the Global
South. He opposed free trade agreements with developed countries on the
grounds that, by simultaneously curtailing the policy space available to
governments while expanding the space for abusive practices by the large
international firms that dominate international trade, they posed an even
greater threat to development than the earlier generation of trade rules under
the GATT. In the aftermath of the Marrakech agreement, Martin was a
prominent figure blocking efforts by OECD countries to push for a multilateral
investment agreement, to extend the neo-liberal agenda at the first WTO
ministerial in Singapore and subsequently at the third meeting in Seattle and
to water down the Doha Development Agenda at the Cancun Ministerial in 2003.
The second front concerned the issues around
the operations of the Bretton Woods Institutions, notably debt and development
finance. Martin had been a long-time critic of the Washington Consensus,
and in particular, the use of policy conditionalities attached to lending by
the IFIs which sought to push a series of damaging measures on developing
countries in the name of efficiency, competitiveness and attracting foreign
investors. But he started to pay greater attention to these after the 1997
Asian financial crisis, arguing against austerity, advocating capital controls,
orderly debt work-out mechanisms, multilateral discipline over exchange rates
and financial policies of major advanced economies and global regulation and
supervision of systemically important international financial firms. He was a
particularly strong advocate of these positions in his role as a member of the Helsinki
Group on Globalisation and Democracy. Martin took the helm of
the South Centre just before the 2009 Global Financial Crisis hit and was quick
to provide substantive assistance to developing countries during the 2009
UN Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on
Development, identifying the key issues for them and working to ensure
their insertion in the Outcome Document. He continued to push hard on these
issues through the research output from the Centre while adding the related
areas of illicit financial flows and international tax issues to its workload
as developing countries sought support on these matters.
The
third, and increasingly prominent, front was climate change and sustainable
development which gained added importance in international discussions in the
new millennium. Environmental issues had always been part of Martin’s work as
head of TWN and as a member of the
Commission on Developing Countries and Global Change. But this
widened significantly after the UN Conference on the
Environment and Development in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Subsequently, Martin
became a member of the Consultative Group
on Sustainable Development and a regular attendee at the UN
Climate Change Conferences that began in 1995 playing a particularly
important role in the Copenhagen COP in 2009 where the neglect of the
development dimension by advanced economies, their reluctance to acknowledge
common but differentiated responsibilities and their naïve belief in
market-friendly solutions to the climate challenge led to acrimonious
discussions and the eventual collapse of the conference. While he clearly
recognized the need to reduce the pace of emissions and protect the
environment, Martin was wary that the measures promoted by industrial countries
could become instruments to stem development in the Global South. Under
his leadership an important part of the work in the South Centre focussed on
this issue. During this time Martin was a strong critic of tighter intellectual
property rights, particularly through trade agreements, that restricted the
transfer of the technologies developing countries needed to help in the fight
against rising global temperatures and to mitigate the climate damage they were
already experiencing. This work had a parallel in Martin’s fight to ease the
burden of TRIPs on developing countries in dealing with public health
emergencies which, thanks to a successful civil society coalition where Martin
was a pivotal figure, eventually succeeded in a permanent amendment to the
TRIPs agreement in 2017. Martin’s support to developing countries in the
climate change negotiations, carried out through the South Centre and TWN,
fostered greater coordination among developing countries in protecting and
promoting their development policy space in the climate negotiations,
highlighting equity, and stressing the international obligation of advanced
economies to provide support to developing countries.
Martin’s
approach to advancing progressive solutions on all these fronts was always one
of quiet determination driven by a passionate commitment to strengthening the
voice of developing countries. He had an envious ability to synthesise and
explain complex negotiating issues to a broad audience and in a way that could
bring on board activists and policy makers alike. He became a trusted advisor
to policy makers and diplomats across the developing world. But Martin was
equally comfortable engaging in a productive debate with policy makers from
advanced countries and in mainstream institutions. His was a
uniquely calming but authoritative voice for increasingly anxious times, one
that has been silenced too soon and at a moment when his commitment to building
a fairer and more resilient world was needed more than ever.
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