After Seattle Where Next For The Wto?

Simon Retallack explores what really happened at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organisation last December, and asks where the WTO -- and its opponents -- should go from here.

Late last year, on the streets and in the conference rooms of Seattle, the most north-westerly city of the USA, there was an unmistakable feeling in the air: the sensation of history being made. In Seattle, the supposedly unstoppable force of economic globalisation faced its first major setback of the post-Cold War era at the hands of an unprecedented alliance of citizens' groups and government delegates from around the world. The principal target and casualty of their protests was the launch of a new 'millennium' round of trade talks by an institution that the majority of the world's public and media had been largely unaware of until Seattle -- the World Trade Organisation.

The WTO came into existence in January 1995 as a result of eight years of negotiations between 125 countries during the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). It operates from Geneva, Switzerland, and has a membership of 135 countries. Its main official functions are to administer and enforce more than 20 international trade-related agreements, resolve trade disputes between states and provide a forum for global trade negotiations.

That, at least, is the formal, innocuous-sounding purpose of the WTO. But strip away the bland bureaucratic facade, and the organisation reveals a more destructive nature. The raison d'etre of the WTO is to eliminate 'barriers to international trade' -- barriers which, according to WTO rules, include not only quotas and tariffs on products crossing national borders, but any impediments to corporate profit-making, such as national, regional or local laws protecting consumers, workers or the environment.

This agenda is forced through by tribunals made up of panels of three trade bureaucrats who have usually made legal careers representing corporate clients on trade issues. They meet in secret and have legally binding powers of enforcement, which include the ability to impose economically severe trade sanctions on offending states.

The Economist has called the WTO 'an embryo world government', and yet not an electorate on the planet has voted for it, nor is it in any meaningful way accountable to the public. Worse -- at every opportunity during its five-year existence, the WTO has sacrificed the public interest on the altar of free trade and corporate gain.

THE WTO'S RECORD

So far, among the national laws that WTO panels have ruled against and consequently caused to be weakened are the US Clean Air Act, the US Endangered Species Act, and Japan's pesticide residue standards for food. The WTO has also ruled against the EU's ban on imports of potentially health-threatening hormone-treated beef, and the EU's banana importing regime, designed to give preferential access to bananas produced by small farmers in the Caribbean. In these two cases, the WTO authorised the imposition of sanctions of $128million and $190million respectively per year until the EU implements its rulings.

Crucially, in every single one of these cases, WTO panels sided with the corporate parties involved: Venezuelan and Brazilian oil companies, Asian shrimp companies, and US fruit and beef companies respectively.

The WTO's track record is now such that the mere threat of WTO action is usually sufficient to persuade countries to change their national laws to be 'WTO-complaint'. Under this so-called 'chilling-effect', the US, for example, has succeeded in substantially weakening an EU ban on the import of fur from animals caught with cruel 'steel jaw' leg traps. At a sub-national level, the Governor of California recently vetoed his state's 'Buy Californian Act', a bill giving locally manufactured goods a 5 per cent preference for state and local government purchases, because he said it would violate WTO rules.

All of these cases are symptomatic of far more serious, deep-seated trends that are being promoted. Environmental degradation, threats to public health, unemployment, income inequality, food insecurity, loss of cultural diversity and threats to human rights are all being exacerbated by the WTO and its agreements.

Despite the WTO's record, the world's two largest trading blocks intended to use the organisation's Third Ministerial Conference in Seattle -- between 30 November and 3 December 1999 -- to further expand the WTO's power.

The United States wanted the WTO to set up a working group to adopt new rules that would ensure unfettered 'market access' globally for genetically modified products, despite growing environmental and health concerns. Another US priority was the adoption by the WTO of an 'Advanced Tariff Liberalisation Initiative' which, amongst other things, would have eliminated tariffs on forestry and fish products by 2004. This would have increased global demand for these products as their cost fell. The result: increased deforestation and further depletion of the world's already over-fished oceans.