WTO--WHY ALL THE FUSS?
Economic globalization is a massive global transfer of economic and political power away from national governments and into the hands of global corporations and trade bureaucracies. The consequences are dire for the environment, human rights, social welfare, agriculture, food safety, workers' rights, national sovereignty, and democracy itself. The WTO is the primary rule-making regime of this globalization process. Its 134-member countries have ceded to it vast powers that once resided within their own body politic, making the WTO rival the International Monetary Fund as the most powerful, secretive, anti-democratic international body on earth.
That global corporate interests come first is the central operating WTO principle, suppressing any obstacles to the smooth operation and rapid expansion of global corporate activity. These "obstacles" are national, provincial, state, and community laws and standards on behalf of labor rights, environmental protection, human rights, consumer rights, local culture, social justice, national sovereignty, and democracy. To expand the free movement and access for corporations, the WTO diminishes the rights and options of nation-states and citizen movements concerned with human beings and nature.
Operating from Geneva, Switzerland, with an administrative staff of 500 people, the WTO has incorporated within itself, with full executive authority, more than 20 separate international agreements, including the once-dominant General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). It can strike down domestic laws, programs, and policies of its member nations, compelling them to establish new laws conforming to WTO rules. This authority extends all the way to provinces, states, counties, and cities.
The WTO's Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) is comprised of panels of corporate and trade lawyers and officials with no education or training in social or environmental issues, who preside in secret hearings as final judges and arbiters of disputes among members, having a profound impact on workers, society, and nature in all countries. The WTO also has extraordinary enforcement powers by means of disciplines, penalties, and trade sanctions which can be so economically severe that even the largest nations must yield.
THE NEW' ECONOMY
Some key characteristics of the globalization process are free trade, deregulation, and privap;tization of as much economic activity as possible, and the rapid commodification of every remaining aspect of life, including the few remaining pristine elements that have so far been outside the trading system: culture, fresh water, seeds, and the genetic structures of life. All are being privatized and commodified.
The ideological heart of this model-free trade-demands the elimination of national regulations, laws, or tariffs that slow down corporations and their investments as they move across national borders for greater and cheaper access to scarce resources, new markets, and cheap labor.
In agriculture, diversity of food production and an emphasis on staple foods to feed local people were sacrificed for single crop monocultures producing luxury crops for export markets, using massive inputs of chemicals and machines, sending mass-produced manufactured and agricultural goods steaming around the planet at staggering environmental costs in the form of ocean and air pollution, energy consumption, and devastating infrastructure developments (new roads, ports, pipelines, dams, and airports).
Much of the pressure to change came packaged as structural adjustment programs that the World Bank and the IMF forced upon small countries. These programs included conditionalities for receiving the loans that require sharply reduced spending on social programs, such as education, health-care, small business assistance, and wage supports. Without these supports, poor people were suddenly much poorer. These measures, combined with pressures to privatize national industries, left economies utterly dependent on and massively indebted to banks and global bureaucracies.
The free trade and free market theories were supposed to produce accelerated economic growth because they gave corporations greatly expanded access to resources and markets and freed them from pesky environmental laws and social standards. All recent research, however, confirms that only a small number of people at the top of the global corporate pyramid--CEOs of global corporations and a small number in upper management-experience significant benefits from all the growth, expansion, mergers, and consolidations created by globalization.
In addition, the resulting environmental havoc has reached unprecedented levels. Global destruction of habitat and species, expanding ozone holes, rapid climate change, and other results are dramatically exacerbated by a system that places economic values and corporate self-interest above all other values.
WTO rulings are so powerful that they take precedence over all other international agreements, including labor agreements and multilateral environmental agreements, such as the Convention on Biodiversity, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that deplete the Ozone Layer, and the Kyoto Climate Change Accord. Its rulings also apply to laws at every level of domestic governance, whether federal, state, regional, or local. It doesn't matter whether a law protecting public health is a US law, a California law, or a county law. If it is challenged successfully in the WTO and found to be an "illegal barrier to free trade," it's got to go.
MECHANISMS OF WTO GOVERNANCE
IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to identify any issue of social, economic, health, culture, or environmental significance that is not strongly affected. Under the WTO's Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), any member nation can challenge any other member country's laws if these laws might be viewed as impediments to free trade under WTO rules. A final ruling by the WTO means that a country's existing environmental, food safety, health, or other laws must be eliminated, or it must pay perpetual fines, or face severe retaliatory trade sanctions. WTO policies and agreements, in effect, dictate domestic farm policies, investment rules, insurance requirements, government expenditures, taxation policies and more, on national, local, and state levels. To avoid such challenges, many governments have conformed their laws to WTO rules or, under the threat of a challenge, have "chilled" possible new laws. Through such direct and indirect powers, the WTO has assumed the role of a global governing body, allowing trade issues to dominate over all other political, social, and environmental concerns.
For example, a consumer organization attempting to pass a law requiring all genetically modified food to be labeled is likely to find that such a law could be ruled a barrier to trade and investment by the WTO. Such a law would then have to be either discarded, rewritten, or "paid" for via trade tariff penalties or direct payments. Environmental groups working at the national level to ban trade in products that pose threats to a species quickly learn that such laws may already have been ruled in conflict with WTO rules and are therefore invalid. Those worried that their country's farming tradition or culture is threatened and who are encouraging their government to assist family farms soon find that the policies and regulations of the WTO will probably have more impact on the future of small farms than domestic agriculture policies set by their elected representatives.
Consequences to public health or democratic sovereignty are not on the table. Public interest nongovernmental organizations and any other noncommercial interests are excluded from every stage of the process. The entire dispute process is conducted behind closed doors; only representatives of the trade offices of national governments, often aided by lobbyists from affected industries, can present legal briefs.
Now global corporations are pushing hard to expand the WTO mandate even further via the proposed new Millennium Round of negotations. In addition to the important and frightening power grabs in food and public health standards, telecommunications, forestry, and other areas, there are new drives to extend WTO oversight in competition (further favoring large global corporations over smaller, local businesses), government procurement (to open up formerly sacred areas such as education, health-care, and public broadcasting to foreign corporations), and more control of investment.
More than 1,200 organizations around the world have signed a statement demanding "no new round" of negotiations, calling instead for an assessment round to review the effects that WTO policies have had to date.
--from Invisible Government: The World Trade Organization: Global Government for the New Millennium? prepared by The International Forum on Globilization, a research and educational institution comprised of 60 researchers, scholars, activists, and economists from 20 countries. For more information, contact the IFG at (415) 771-8094, <ifg@ifg.org> <www.ifg.org> or write to 1555 Pacific Avenue, S.F., CA 94109.