FFWD Weekly
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| Viewpoint by Hamish MacAulay At the end of this month, Seattle, Washington will become a battlefield in the fight for the hearts and minds of North Americans on economic globalization. From November 30 to December 3, leaders and economic ministers from over 130 countries will be in Seattle to set the direction and rules for international trade as part of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) second biennial ministerial conference. The WTO, a physical representation of governments' efforts to break down barriers to international trade, has become a focal point for the most important issue facing our societies: economic globalization and the sovereignty of nations. Canadians have not debated free trade on a holistic level since we elected Brian Mulroney in 1988, but free-trade and economic globalization issues (split-run magazines, airline and bank mergers, and genetically modified crops) dominate political debate in Canada as they do elsewhere. As Canadians know, these are difficult issues because, despite our best efforts at times, they defy political stereotyping. Conservatives, reactionaries and liberals can all end up on the same side of the issue. Global economy adherents say bank mergers are good, but the Reform Party and the Council of Canadians both agree that they’re not in Canada's best interest. Small "l" liberals and lefties probably end up in the deepest quandry over these issues because their concerns for protecting the environment and the local economy conflict with the efforts of developing nations to deal with the rich western world on trade issues. The issues will be debated at length this month. A diverse army of activists and interest groups will also descend on Seattle to protest the growing influence of the world trade initiatives to undermine the efforts of countries to protect their environments and local agricultural industries. Environmental and agricultural groups are concerned that the WTO has the power to wipe out their hard-fought gains at the local and national levels, and they are organizing to move beyond simply thinking globally. This army has been preparing for the conference for months and have organized an agenda of their own complete with rallys, marches, workshops, speakers and teach-ins on agriculture, the environment and human rights. The key message for the protesters is that the WTO needs a thorough review and reform. A permanent organization created to replace the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), the WTO came into being in 1995 after the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations. Since 1947, a growing number of countries have created international trade agreements through the GATT negotiations. The trade agreements, signed by either some or all of the current WTO members, form the rulebook on international trade that the WTO is meant to oversee and enforce. There are now approximately 60 agreements and 30,000 pages of text in the rule book. More than anything, anti-WTO groups are up in arms over the means of enforcing the trade agreements. Critics claim that the WTO is an undemocratic institution that works behind closed doors, and it has the power to overturn legislation passed by democratically elected governments if the legislation contravenes a trade agreement. Technically the WTO does not have the power to overturn legislation, but it does have a powerful form of economic coercion at its disposal. If a country believes that someone else has violated the terms of a GATT agreement, it may ask the WTO to convene a dispute panel. The panel will determine if the offender’s actions have broken the agreement, and it will set a course of action and a timeline to fix the problem, including repealing legislation if necessary. Failure to comply with the panel's decision gives the aggrieved country, and anyone else who is party to the trade agreement, the right to place punitive taxes and tariffs on the offender's goods that contravene trade agreements. In the recent dispute between the European Union and the United States over the import of Caribbean bananas, the U.S. asked for $520 million in retaliatory tariffs on European goods if Europe failed to remove a tariff on bananas from the Chiquita protectorates of Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras. As is always the case, it never got that far and the EU backed down before the economic sanctions could be implemented. This economic coercion is a powerful tool that has the ability to limit the freedom of governments to reflect the will of their citizens. Canadians must ask two questions: Are the benefits of increased international trade worth losing some of our sovereignty and ability to define our society? Are there, in fact, other paths other than the GATT/WTO process that we can follow to create a fair economic playing field across the globe? This is part one of three articles. Next week: The cage match – environmentalists, the WTO and developing nations duke it out. Web resources on the WTO in Seattle www.wto.org http://www.seattlewto.org/ http://www.corporations.org/democracy/wto.html |
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