Special Feature
Walden Bello
(Coauthored with Nicola Bullard. Keynote speech at the People’s Conference against Globalisation, New Delhi, March 2123, 2001. Excerpts.)
Today we are in a different ballgame from that in the midnineties, when the social and environmental clause strategy was devised. Whatever merits it may have had then, today such an approach is unsound and counterproductive, both tactically and strategically. Tactically, it is unsound because the only way to smuggle it into the WTO is by having a new trade round that would simply open up the space for other forces to add new agenda for liberalization and globalization such as competition policy, investment policy, more agricultural liberalization, a new round of industrial tariff cuts, a TRIPs even more congenial to TNC interests. A new round is a Pandora’s Box. The WTO, says C. Fred Bergsten, is like a bicycle. It can only remain upright by moving forward in terms of more liberalization and globalization. Our immediate goal must be to pin the bicycle down and out of locomotion by preventing a new trade round.
Moving on to an offensive strategy against the key institutions of globalization, priority must be put on stopping a new trade round from being launched at the Qatar Ministerial in November of this year. Beyond this, we must support the moves of many peasant and farmer groups like Via Campesina to remove agriculture from WTO discipline. We must ensure that no consensus emerges in the current negotiations on the GATS, the General Agreement on Trade in Services, which would stalemate the process. We must likewise put ourselves squarely behind the drive to place public health above TRIPs and profits by supporting the drive to reproduce and massmarket patented AIDs drugs at cheap prices. We must campaign to enshrine the priority of the precautionary principle above free trade, deriving momentum from the GMO, mad cow and footandmouth ecohealth disasters. Likewise, we must place ourselves firmly behind the South’s demand for the recognition and institutionalization of “Special and Differential Treatment”that underdeveloped countries require a different set of trade rulesin trade negotiations among countries. The overall strategy is to disempower or radically “shrink” the WTO so that it becomes simply another forum, with very limited and very diluted coercive capabilities, for trade negotiations.
When it comes to the IMF and the World Bank, the time is ripe to press and build up a global campaign for decommssioning or neutering these institutions. Currently, there are a number of influential appointees in the economic agencies of the Bush administration who favor either eliminating or radically reducing the role of the Bretton Woods institutions. With many Republicans and Democrats in Congress evincing similar sentiments, international civil society and labor unions might add their weight to form a critical mass that would determine the future of these institutions. As the head of one international agency who follows politics in this area fairly closely told us, “The mutilateral institutions are today very vulnerable to a pincer movement carried out by, on the one hand, the conservatives in the new administration and, on the other, international civil society.” It might be added that another factor that should spur decisive action on our part is that the staffs of both institutions are severely demoralized currently by the combination of external criticism and/or internal mismanagement. Windows of opportunity are rare, and we better move before this one slams shut.
Next, unions and civil society organizations must band together to scuttle - while they are still in the dockyard the Free Trade of the Americas Agreement and similar global free trade treaties that are now being pushed - partly as a substitute for the stalemated WTO. These regional or bilateral agreements are as much guided by the destructive principles of neoliberalismliberalization, deregulation, and privatization - as the WTO. Here it must be noted that full opposition to both the FTAA and a new trade round were two of the agreements contained in the common statement signed by hundreds of unions and civil society organizations at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre a few weeks ago.
Finally, we must extend the crisis of legitimacy from the multilateral institutions of global governance to the engine of globalization itself: the transnational corporation. TNCs are in disrepute today, and even in the US a recent survey has shown that 70 per cent of the people feel that TNCs have too much power over their lives. Corporations find it less and less possible to operate without engaging in criminal activity. This similarity between the mafia and the TNC is something that we must continually stress in this campaign of delegitimation. It is only when we realize how great is the potential of campaigns to unmask the criminal that is at the heart of the corporation that we begin to see how inappropriate and untimely is Kofi Annan’s Global Compact and understand how it functions less as a lifesaver for society than a lifesaver for TNCs.