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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Duty-free in Seattle
By Faiza RadyFull-scale popular mobilisation against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting scheduled to take place in Seattle from 29 November to 3 December is picking up steam, not only in the US, but around the world. Trade unions, left-wing political parties, community-based and church-affiliated groups, together with social and environmental NGOs , are preparing to hold massive demonstrations, sit-ins, and teach-in to denounce the WTO's advancing of the corporate platform under the banner of "free trade".
In the name of market liberalisation, the organisation plans to transform the planet into a vast supermarket, with itself as general manager, critics say. The WTO already controls trade transactions worth billions of dollars every year. In Seattle, the aim is to gain effective regulatory control of the global "service sector" -- a loose category which, according to Susan George of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, manages to encompass most known human activities, including distribution, trade, building and public works, architecture, interior design, maintenance, engineering and technology, financial services, banking and insurance, research and development, tourism and travel and all forms of transport.
This is bad news not only for consumers, but for all citizens. For, as the US-based Working Group on the WTO notes in a recent report, "Under the WTO's system of corporate-managed trade, economic efficiency, reflected in short-run corporate profits, dominates all other values."
The problem with the WTO is not simply its intentions, but the power which national governments, democratic and authoritarian, left and right, have seen fit to cede to it. The organisation can override any existing legislation which contravenes its regulations, and the decisions of its tribunals, ruling in secret, are backed up with effective sanctions. National governments are not allowed to participate in the tribunal process, and there are no appeals. Following the issue of a WTO ruling, those countries which have lost the case have three options: change their law to conform to the WTO requirements, pay permanent compensation to the victor, or face non-negotiated trade sanctions of the kind currently imposed by the US on countries such as Cuba, Iraq and Libya.
No wonder the WTO is universally reviled by supporters of local democracy. Even the city of Seattle, which was chosen to host this year's "Millennium Round" inaugural meeting, has decided to reject the controversial WTO-sponsored Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), declaring itself, like San Francisco, Boulder (Colorado), Geneva, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, an "MAI-Free Zone".
"The irony is delicious that the elected officials of the one city in the entire world chosen for the ultimate globalisation summit have rejected the very concept for themselves," commented Lori Wallach, lawyer and director of the US-based Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.
The MAI is a proposed international trade agreement which was stalled last year. If signed, the treaty would effectively cripple much of national and regional sovereignty by subordinating local financial legislation and regulation of currency speculation, stock markets, banking and investment to WTO-style "free market" rules.
Secretly negotiated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) -- the "rich nation's club", which encompasses the governments of 29 developed countries -- the MAI document only became public when a leaked draft version began to circulate on the Internet. Activists fear that, if enforced, the treaty would make almost any substantial social and environmental legislation unenforceable. In particular, the agreement would establish the right of corporations and financiers to sue nations and tamper with their laws before a special court, which would itself be largely exempt from any form of democratic control.
Following massive opposition by a broad-based coalition of activists from across the political spectrum, France eventually decided to pull out of the MAI negotiations, which thus ground to a halt earlier last year. The business lobby, however, is currently seeking to have the treaty reintroduced by the back door, by placing it at the top of the WTO's agenda.
Among the groups which figure prominently in the anti-WTO protest are the Washington Association of Churches, the American Federation of Labour and the Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), the Citizens' Trade Campaign, the Council of Canadians and People's Global Action. Many of these organisations, though North American-based, also work closely with organisations in the South through the anti-WTO umbrella organisation, the International Forum on Globalisation.
Alarmed at the extent of grassroots mobilisation against the new corporate agenda, the US Department of Commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce, together with the Business Roundtable, toured 11 US cities earlier this year. Fielding a formidable delegation, headed by no-less a personage than US Secretary of Commerce Daley, the administration-backed caravan sought to spread the word about the many "benefits" to be derived from "free trade".
Wallach, however, asked "the commerce cabal" to stop and listen to workers, farmers, church leaders and consumer activists. "This is the coalition of folks who will continue stopping bad deals until a new, more broadly beneficial trade policy is launched," she said.
Opposition to the WTO and its agenda is apparently so alarming that even academics and NGO leaders are being placed under police surveillance, and sometimes arrested for the "crime" of organising conferences. And this repression is happening in Western democracies.
"Detained for Debate", ran the 27 August 1998 headline of a leaflet issued by the Globalisation and Resistance Seminar, held in Geneva, Switzerland. Fifty participants, from 17 countries, were taken in riot vans to the local police station and detained without explanation.
"Under the steamroller of neoliberal globalisation, it seems that the space of public criticism is faced with increasing repression and the denial of civil and political freedoms," read the seminar's statement to the press.
The WTO was the last of the Bretton Woods institutions to see the light of day. Created in 1995 out of the GATT process, which it superseded, its mission is to devise and enforce rules which will promote "free trade". Critics, however, contend that there is nothing "free" about the kind of trade it favours, since the WTO simply embodies the interests of the transnational corporations, whose last wish is to see the establishment of a truly level playing field -- one on which small-scale local cooperative enterprises could hold their own against the predations of international capital.
In addition to dismantling tariffs and quota regulations, the organisation seeks to abolish a number of alleged "barriers" to free trade, including labour laws, food safety and environmental regulations, product standards, copyright and patent laws and national investment policies, along with any government use of tax moneys which might in some way redress the balance of power in favour of national and local economic activity.
As a result, the WTO has come under almost constant attack since its creation. "In the world we live in, decision making shifts further and further from local community control, and into the hands of corporate lobby groups, such as the International Chamber of Commerce and the Geneva-based World Economic Forum," explained Susan George.
Although neo-liberalism promotes "free" trade under the guise of providing wealth and prosperity for all, 20 hard years of worldwide structural adjustment policies -- privatisation of public sectors, elimination of tariff and trade barriers, roll-back of health and welfare benefits -- have only contrived to increase the chasm that separates the rich from the poor, and generate an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of the international power elite.
The figures speak for themselves. Less than 30 years after the abandonment of the gold standard floated off the global economy into the hands of speculators and card-sharks, transnational corporations have firmly established themselves as the most powerful economic and political actors in the world. Today, the revenues of the top 500 companies in the US make up about 60 per cent of the country's GDP. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations, and only 49 are countries.
Thus the combined revenues of General Motors and Ford -- the two largest automobile corporations in the world -- together exceed the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. And the combined sales of Mitsubishi, Mitsui, ITOCHU, Sumitomo, Marubeni and Nissho Iwai, Japan's top six trading companies, are nearly equivalent to the GDP of all of South America. This is not simply a stranglehold over existing profit streams, but over the future too. Transnationals hold 90 per cent of all technology and product patents worldwide, as well as control 70 per cent of existing global trade.
At the other end of the scale, the statistics documenting the misery of the world's poor are equally staggering. One fifth of the developing world's population goes hungry every night. More than one billion people worldwide are denied access to clean drinking water, a fact which alone causes a daily death toll of some 25,000. And one third of the people of the South live in a state of abject poverty, "at such a margin of human existence that words simply fail to describe it," according to writer Joshua Karliner.
As the distribution of income and resources under the neo-liberal consensus becomes increasingly obscene, the world's poor are the inevitable victims of the chaos wreaked by financial speculation and economic instability. It is not the currency traders and the CFOs who suffer during massive lay-offs and savage health and welfare benefit cuts. To quote Karliner again, "Overall, the gap between rich and poor, which doubled worldwide between 1960 and 1991, continues to grow as the benefits of globalisation fall into the hands of an elite group of recipients."
This is the redistribution of wealth over which the WTO is presiding. Robin Hood must be turning in his grave.
