WTO

The following three paragraphs are taken from Paul Hawken's experience of the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle in 1999. The full text of his journal entry can be found on the web at places like this.

When the “The Final Act Embodying the Results of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations” was enacted April 15th, 1994 in Marrakech, it was recorded as a 550-page agreement that was then sent to Congress for passage. Ralph Nader offered to donate $10,000 to any charity of a congressman’s choice if any of them signed an affidavit saying they had read it and could answer several questions about it. Only one congressman - Senator Hank Brown, a Colorado Republican - took him up on it. After reading the document, Brown changed his opinion and voted against the Agreement. There were no public hearings, dialogue, or education. What passed is an Agreement that gives the WTO the ability to overrule or undermine international conventions, acts, treaties, and agreements. The WTO directly violates “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” adopted by member nations of the United Nations, not to mention Agenda 21. (The proposed draft agenda presented in Seattle went further in that it would require Multilateral Agreements on the Environment such as the Montreal Protocol, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Kyoto Protocol to be in alignment and subordinate to WTO trade polices.) The final Marrakech Agreement contained provisions of which most of the delegates, even the heads of country delegations, were not aware, statutes that were drafted by sub-groups of bureaucrats and lawyers, some of whom represented transnational corporations.

...

Those who marched and protested opposed the tyrannies of globalization, uniformity, and corporatization, but they did not necessarily oppose internationalization of trade. Economist Herman Daly has long made the distinction between the two. Internationalization means trade between nations. Globalization refers to a system where there are uniform rules for the entire world, a world in which capital and goods move at will without the rule of individual nations. Nations, for all their faults, set trade standards. Those who are willing to meet those standards can do business with them. Do nations abuse this? Always and constantly, the US being the worst offender. But nations do provide, where democracies prevail, a means for people to set their own policy, to influence decisions, and determine their future. Globalization supplants the nation, the state, the region, and the village. While eliminating nationalism is indeed a good idea, the elimination of sovereignty is not.

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One recent example of the power of the WTO is Chiquita Brands International, a $2 billion dollar corporation which recently made a large donation to the Democratic Party. Coincidentally, the United States filed a complaint with the WTO against the European Union because European import policies favored bananas coming from small Caribbean growers instead of the banana conglomerates. The Europeans freely admitted their bias and policy: they restricted imports from large multinational companies in Central America (plantations whose lands were secured by US military force during the past century), and favored small family farmers from former colonies who used fewer chemicals. It seemed like a decent thing to do, and everyone thought the bananas tasted better. For the banana giants, this was untenable. The United States prevailed in this WTO-arbitrated case. So who won, and who lost? Did the Central American employees at Chiquita Brands win? Ask the hundreds of workers in Honduras who were made infertile by the use of dibromochloropropane on the banana plantations. Ask the mothers whose children have birth defects from pesticide poisoning. Did the shareholders of Chiquita win? At the end of 1999, Chiquita Brands was losing money because they were selling bananas at below cost to muscle their way into the European market. Their stock was at a 13 year low, the shareholders were angry, the company was up for sale, but the prices of bananas in Europe are really cheap. Who lost? Caribbean farmers who could formerly make a living and send their kids to school can no longer do so because of low prices and demand.

I'm sharing this because it was quite amazing to me as I read it a couple of days ago, and now re-reading I continue to be quite amazed. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about the WTO... the thing is, I'm willing to bet that you - and your elected representatives - don't know much, either. And that may just cause me to change the name of this blog, because it's one thing that I can't make sense of.