Walden Bello shares some reflections on the meaning of Seattle for change in knowledge systems, discusses how despite the deep crisis of neoliberalism, finance capital has managed to retain tremendous power, and appeals for a new comprehensive vision of the desirable society.
Netherlands/Jakarta, 14 November 2014 - The announcement on November 13th of a US-India agreement on trade facilitation and India’s food security programme was denounced today by Transnational Institute and Serikat Petani Indonesia (SPI), the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation as a “victory for transnational corporations at the expense of peasant farmers.”
This sequel to the “Tailored for Sharks” report delves deeper into the role the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its legal system play in the corporate architecture that benefits and protects interests of Transnational Corporations (TNCs); details concrete examples of TNCs behind trade disputes; and presents the post-Bali corporate roadmap.
Political scientist and author on Third World poverty issues, Susan George gives us her thoughts on the prospects for a free trade deal at the WTO in Bali.
Amongst many other analyses and debates, the more extensive awareness of the active role of the state and of states in the purportedly highly successful 'market economies' in East Asia and South East Asia is bringing discussion of the role of state back into quite mainstream development discourse.
Alternatives to neo-liberal globalisation are needed that not only change people-to-people and South-South relations and situations, but also South-North relations and inter-actions to the benefit of all of humanity and our common planetary home.
South Africa is playing a significant role in supporting and extending the power of the World Trade Organisation, a new system of global government. This not only entails South Africa surrendering its own policy-making rights and space, but also means bargaining away the South African peoples’ democratic rights to determine their country’s internal economic, environmental, social and cultural policies.
The language contained in agreements being negotiated by the EU through the WTO with their southern counterparts often deliberately diguises real political goals, obscuring the negative economic implications for those countries of the neoliberal agenda.
The international free trade and investment policies and the related WTO agreements played a major role in undermining so many developing countries' economies. The proponents of tese policies, including the EU, are now urging the govenrments of the world to end their resistance to such policies within the WTO.
Betina from Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Oaxaca, Mexico) joined Tade to Climate Caravan to denounce the malicious practices behind the clean-energy windmills set up in Oaxaca, which are displacing indigenous communities from their land.
As a farmer from Paraguay afected by genetically modified soy monoculture plantation, Jorge Galeano is part of the resistance against false solutions to climate change. He is a part of Trade to Climate Caravan, travelling from the 7th WTO ministerial conference in Geneva to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen (COP15), drawing the attention to the consequences neoliberal globalization and climate change have on the lives of the people in the south.
Sixty activists from the global South and Europe are currently touring Europe on their way to Copenhagen. Starting out at Seventh Sessions of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Geneva from 30 November to 2 December, the tour passes through Italy, Germany, France and Belgium before arriving in Copenhagen on 9 December.
Ten years on from Seattle, TNI and other activists from Enlazando Alternativas have mobilised in Geneva together with the global network Our World is Not For Sale (OWINFS) to expose the role of the WTO and the "free trade" agreements in causing economic and climate crisis.
The WTO's crisis of legitimacy is evident in that despite deepening food, financial, economic and climate crises—to which the WTO has contributed significantly—its deregulation and liberalisation agenda remains much the same as in 2001.
WTO+10: Before 1999, the momentum of globalization seemed to sweep everything in front of it, including the truth. But in Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action.
