 |
A special report |
|
A special report |
What happened in Seattle?The meeting
of the World Trade Organization in Seattle made headlines all around the
world, but now that the dust has settled it is important to examine
the impact that the WTO has on the world's environmental and developmental
prospects. |
What Next After the Battle of Seattle?
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Making Sense Out of the WTO
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| Tony
Blair once said that 'Globalisation is irreversible and irresistible'.
That is a very 'New' Labour statement, but after the Battle of Seattle,
very wrong. There were in fact two battles that halted the march of
globalisation, the well publicised one on the streets and the equally
significant one inside the World Trade Organisation meeting. At packed
public meetings and rallies before and during the WTO Ministerial a
clear consensus emerged from amongst the protestors. Third world
activists, as distinct from most of their government's besuited
delegates, warned of how the plight of the poor in their countries was
made worse by the trade liberalisation and an emphasis on exports. Consumers and environmentalists demanded that protection of the environment should be served by trade and not subsumed to it. Trades unionists from both north and south demanded that job security and labour conditions not be sacrificed to a set of fallacious world trade rules, drafted by, and for the benefit of, transnational companies and capital. Inside the Hall third world delegates, still wedded to the ideas of evermore open trade, demanded that the north open its markets more quickly as their own countries had been forced to do in the last round of trade talks. They were also subjects to crass bullying from the US Trade Representative Charlene Barshevsky and administrative incompetence by the WTO's head Michael Moore, both of whom were booed by southern delegates during the meeting. The usual deal making was attempted between the head honchos of the 200 strong US delegation (with its around 60 business 'advisors') and the European delegation of 594. The third world delegates then had their arms twisted to accept the resulting draft agreements that they had been allowed no role in deciding. Perhaps the final indignity was the punctual 135 trade ministers being made to sit for an hour waiting for a late President Clinton, with security guards refusing to even let them go to the toilet. The cumulative result was an unprecedented public rebellion by third world delegates that, with the inability of the US and EU to carve up a deal to their mutual benefit, resulted in the collapse of the talks. The world should be grateful for this setback for trade liberalisation. Had an agreement been signed then the damaging items on the draft agreements circulating would have included the EU's desire to reintroduce the basics of the discredited Multilateral Agreement on Investment. This would be particularly damaging to poor countries as it would threaten their often nascent manufacturing, service and financial sectors with not only investment liberalisation, but with foreign multinational investor protection against curbs in their potential profits. In return the EU seemed ready to allow the US to reduce tariffs on items such as wood, fish, chemical and energy products. The expected result of this would have been in the case of forests for example an increase in wood consumption and logging and deforestation in biodiversity hotspots such as Indonesia and Malaysia, whose forest are already disappearing at an alarming rate. The EU was also it appeared willing to consider giving US multinationals eventual access to its public services such as health and education, under the banner of liberalising services. Similarly it appeared that European support for agriculture on environmental and societal grounds was also threatened. Perhaps most bizarre of all was the public humiliation of the 15 EU Environment Ministers, over one of the continents most political hot potatoes- GMOs. The US wanted a WTO working group on biotechnology products as a step towards weakening countries' abilities to ban the imports of GMOs, understandably the European ministers did not. However, the new EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, in a show of disdain for sovereign members wishes that will not be lost on Euro-sceptics, loftily pronounced that he had agreed with the US that such a working party should be on the table, since 'the EU cannot stand alone against the US, if we do we will not get what we want'. So where do things go from here? To hear the official recriminations and pronouncements all that is required for the bad ship globalisation to be relaunched is to wait until the US elections are over, to improve the efficiency of the WTOs modus operandi and to ensure there is a degree more third world delegate 'consultation' over what the US and EU want. On the other side stands the demands of the third world delegates and civil society united in their call for a review of WTO agreements and a halt to the introduction of new issues into trade talks. Where grass root demands go further than that of third world governments was in the declaration signed by nearly 1600 organisations from 90 countries calling for a halt to further liberalisation. In a pre-conference Teach In organised by the San Francisco based International Forum on Globalisation third world speakers made it clear that export led growth was damaging their social and environmental fabric. Sara Larrain, a Chilean grass roots environmentalist standing for President on a manifesto based on a two year community consultation process, asked exasperatedly 'why is it that people from the north think exports benefit us, they are wrecking our environment and increasing inequality?' The time that the collapse of the WTO's agenda and timetable will buy must be used to allow this crucial questioning of whether more open markets, particularly for third world exports, equals more growth, equals less poverty. The evidence is mostly in the other direction, more trade has meant more global and national inequality and more rapacious use of the world's resources, resulting in increased environmental degradation. Clare Short, singing from the same hymn sheet as the TNCs that so benefit from more trade liberalisation constantly repeats the Orwellian mantra 'more investment and trade, more development', but many third world activists know different. Another common theme of demands from those both from rich and poor countries outside the convention hall was for trade rules that actually benefit the majority through an emphasis on rebuilding local communities and furthering local trade. Free trade apologists are inclined to use the analogy that ensuring more beneficial trade is like riding a bicycle, if you stop pedaling you fall off. These clowns have perhaps spent so much time in limos that they have forgotten that what you actually do to stop falling off the bike, is to put your foot down. That's just what was done at Seattle and it is only the first step in a global fight to ensure that trade rules are changed to benefit the majority, not the multinationals. Colin Hines is author
of the forthcoming Earthscan book: 'Localisation-a global manifesto'.
|
As
everyone now knows, the World Trade Organization's (WTO) meeting in
Seattle was interrupted by protestors who were mostly peaceful.
Over-reaction by local police led to the "Battle of Seattle."
As an acknowledgment of this over-reaction, the Seattle chief of police
has now resigned.[1] The main goal of the WTO's Seattle meeting was to begin a new round of international talks, the so-called "millennium round," which was expected to last 3 years. That goal was thwarted. Emboldened partly by protestors in Seattle's streets, Third World envoys to the WTO rejected a new round of talks.[2] So the millennium round will not begin, at least not right away. Delaying the new talks was a sweet victory for the protesters and an important assertion of independence by Third World countries. But we should not fool ourselves. The WTO is still entirely intact. It was not changed in any fundamental way by the protests. More importantly, the goals and the power of those who created the WTO remain untouched. The people who created the WTO have one main goal: an integrated global economy unencumbered by government restrictions. This economic goal has two parts: globalized and unencumbered. The globalization of the world's economies is proceeding steadily and cannot be stopped. The world's economies are being laced (or yoked) together by communication technologies (radio, TV, telephones, fiber optic cables, satellites and computers, among others). A flood of invention is inexorably weaving (or chaining) the strands of the world's economies into a single huge network of relationships. No one can stop globalization from happening. However, governments could take many steps to reduce the harmful consequences for human societies.[3] Unfortunately the people who created the WTO are ideologically opposed to any government involvement. They have their own utopian vision, a globalized economy unencumbered by government restrictions -- global free trade. Economists have a name for such an economy: Laissez Faire. In a Laissez Faire economy, the owners of capital are free to make all the important decisions -- they decide what to make, how to make it, where to get the raw materials, whom to employ (under what conditions and at what wages), and where to sell their products or services. In a Laissez Faire economy, the role of government is limited to enforcing property rights, assuring a stable currency, providing a system of justice for resolving disputes, and maintaining a military apparatus to enforce civil and international peace. Government has one other key role in a Laissez Faire economy: to maintain such an economy, government must relentlessly thwart democratic tendencies among the governed. (For example, When President Reagan destroyed the Air Traffic Controllers union in 1981, he was using the powers of government to bolster a wannabe Laissez Faire regime.) If governments don't relentlessly oppose democratic tendencies, people will soon direct their government to (for example) limit the length of the workday, guarantee their right to form a trade union, insist that everyone deserves health care, and set minimum wages, all of which doom laissez faire. This is why laissez faire economies are incompatible with political democracy: laissez faire economies do not arise spontaneously and can only be sustained if the state aggressively suppresses democratic tendencies. In sum, the WTO isn't mainly about trade. It is mainly about establishing the kind of economy, worldwide, in which the owning class gets to make all important decisions without interference from governments or from anyone else. Today the key institution of the owning class is the corporation, so the aim of the WTO is to ensure that corporations are empowered to make all the important decisions without interference. To put it another way, the main work of the WTO isn't promoting world trade -- it is getting rid of rules made by governments, rules that restrict the freedom of corporations to make decisions affecting production and labor. Government rules are described as "restrictions on trade" but this "trade" language is a euphemism for "restrictions on corporate freedom." To summarize, then, the WTO isn't chiefly concerned with trade -- it is chiefly concerned with "Who gets to decide?" When governments are weakened, corporations are strengthened. The WTO was set up to weaken governments. ========== [1] Sam Howe Verhovek, "Seattle Police Chief Resigns in Aftermath of Protests," NEW YORK TIMES December 8, 1999, pg. A13. [2] Joseph Kahn and David E. Sanger, "Seattle Talks on Trade End With Stinging Blow to U.S.," NEW YORK TIMES December 5, 1999, pgs. A1, A14. [3] Paul Krugman, THE RETURN OF DEPRESSION ECONOMICS (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), ISBN 0-393-04839-X. Krugman recommends controls on the flow of capital under certain circumstances -- a heresy among the global free trade cult. Peter Montague is the editor of Rachels Environmental and Health Weekly from which this article has been excerpted. Back issues of this electronic newsletter are available at http://www.rachels.org. A previous article by Peter Montague, on the environmental impact of the WTO is available on our website. |
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