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MAKING CONTACT Transcript: #38-99 World Trade: Global and Local Consequences Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact: Judith Barish: The purpose of economic globalization, as it's proceeding under corporate rules, is to allow the corporations and their corporate allies in government to conspire against workers, consumers, citizens at large. Phillip Babich: At the end of November the World Trade Organization will hold its fourth worldwide ministerial meeting in Seattle, Washington, marking the beginning of its fifth year. Since 1995, the WTO has managed to over-rule several environmental and safety laws in North America and Europe. On this program, we take a look at the WTO and the significance of its annual meeting, which is expected to draw not only top government officials from around the globe, but also tens of thousands of activists, scholars and labor organizers from around the world. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information. The World Trade Organization is an international institution that deliberates on trade policy. It's organizational structure and power to enact trade sanctions or nullify laws in member countries may sound far-out to the casual observer. But, it's effects on matters of daily importance to most of us are quite real. World Trade Organization representatives are un-elected and virtually unaccountable. The enforcement mechanism of the WTO is what is known as a tribunal. The public, including non-governmental organizations, have no access to tribunal deliberations. Further, the identity of tribunal members is never revealed. But, tribunal decisions must be adhered to by the governments of member nations. One recent example, involves a European Union ban on imported U.S. beef treated with hormones. The WTO ruled that the European Union's ban was, in effect, an unfair trade barrier. The ruling essentially overturned the EU's desire to protect Europeans from potentially unsafe meat. Currently, the EU has refused to acquiesce to the WTO and is in a serious trade dispute with the United States. Kevin Danaher, co-founder of Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights group, told Norman that the WTO is subverting public interests to business interests. He adds that the WTO is the Supreme Court of the global economy. Kevin Danaher: It would seem, just, you know, on the face of our belief in democracy, that if we were gonna have an institution that was creating rules and enforcing rules for the global economy, we'd wanna have everybody represented: the small farmers, the carpenters, the truck drivers, the nurses, the housewives, everybody. And instead, who's represented in the World Trade Organization is transnational corporations--just the biggest concentrations of global capital. So lo and behold, when you look at the rulings they've made and the kind of rules they enforce, it's almost always--and in fact it is always, a hundred percent of the time so far in every case--it has come down on the side of the biggest money, the biggest concentrations of corporate wealth against the interests of sea turtles, dolphins, small banana farmers in the Caribbean, all sorts of interests. We for example here in the United States are breathing dirtier air now than we did five years ago because of a ruling by the World Trade Organization that said we have to allow Venezuelan oil companies to sell dirtier gasoline in the United States than was previously allowed by U.S. law. For a lot of people, that's just insane. Norman Solomon: One of the big pushes has been to further deregulate the financial markets during the 1990s, and I wonder if you feel there's something qualitative going on here in terms of a global shift and how financial institutions are able to function within and through different borders. Kevin Danaher: Yeah, I think it's very dangerous; I think this is extremely dangerous. If you go back about thirty years, 95% of all currency exchanges in the global economy were for either trade or direct investment. That is, 95% of all international currency change, exchange was for the real economy produce goods and services or ship them around the planet. You come up to the present, those percentages have flipped. About 95% of all the currency exchange going on in the world is for speculative purposes. The derivatives market, betting on which way currency values are going to go, and only about 5% is used for the real production of tires, toothpaste, and things that human beings can actually use. So an increasing amount of capital is going away from real productive investment, of things that we need, toward speculation by a small group of financiers in order to make more money. And I think we saw, over the past few years, from summer of 1977 on, that you can have major economies like the Indonesian economy, the Thailand economy, the South Korean economy. The South Korean economy had reached a point of industrialization where the average South Korean worker was making more than the average British worker, and then they had this financial crisis and they went in the tank. And notice that in all of the business press, nowhere (you know, they blame crony capitalism and corruption, and all these different things) nowhere did they say maybe it's something systemic. Maybe it's something built into the capitalist global economy that caused this to happen. The basic problem is that Third World elites are more beholden to Washington and Wall Street than they are accountable to their own people. If Third World ruling elites are more accountable to outside interests than their own people, you're never going to have real democracy. And you're never going to have real development either. Norman Solomon: Well, let's take Asia for an example then. Say Thailand, where you've had U.S. secretaries of treasury or commerce going to Asia explaining the benefits of lowering barriers for financial services, making these services, these huge institutions worldwide, really. What does that have to do with speculation and what kind of impact does that have on people who are farmers in Thailand or, for that matter, in the United States? Kevin Danaher: I think a good way for listeners to understand this is imagine in your community, imagine your neighborhood. Visualize the economy of your neighborhood. And I come in and I say, Look, what you've gotta do is you've gotta let outside big capital come in and do whatever it wants in your neighborhood. If they want to take out all the stop signs, so the trucks can get through faster, yeah some of your kids might get run over, but this is in the interest of speeding up the economy. And the benefits are going to trickle down because you're increasing commerce. And that's what's being told to these different nations. "You deregulate," you hear this all the time: "deregulate," "privatize." Sell off your government agencies, like in Haiti they sold off the national telephone company. It was bringing in $61 million a year and to the Haitian government. That's money now that's going into private hands instead of into the Haitian government to do social services, health care, education. So what the insight of big capital was, was that government--either the Leninist variety or the democratic liberal social democratic variety--is a way that the people can get hold of capital and regulate corporations. So what you want to do is you want to create a super agency, a global agency, like the World Trade Organization that can run and run around national government. So national governments sign on to the World Trade Organization to be members, and then the World Trade Organization subverts democracy by saying, No, what has to rule is not the environment or meeting social needs; it's capital and the market, and profit-making for corporations. Phillip Babich: Kevin Danaher, co-founder of Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights group. In a so-called free market economic system, the bottom line reigns. In the name of profit, corporations have searched out the cheapest and most exploitable labor, often in developing countries -- but not limited to them. As the global economy expands, many academics, activists and labor organizers are questioning key ideological components of the free market. The major questions include: what is the relationship between capital and labor? Is all capital, or money, the result of labor? And, if profit is the primary motive in the free market economic system, how can labor interests be fully represented? Since its inception, the WTO has given short shrift to labor concerns. In fact, the former director general of the WTO, Renato Rugierro, has said quite clearly in the past that the WTO is no place for labor issues. Internationally, there are different points of view among labor unions and movements as to which institutions can best represent workers' rights in a global economy. That is, can the WTO adequately represent labor concerns, or should the ILO, the International Labor Organization, be strengthened with enforcement mechanisms to counter the WTO? Judith Barish is the former communications director for the California AFL-CIO. She spoke with Norman Solomon and Julie Light about labor and the WTO. Judith Barish: One World Trade Organization official who was quoted anonymously in the Financial Times said, "The WTO is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups. Allowing non-governmental organizations in could open the door as to all kinds of lobbyists opposed to free trade." That was the quote in the newspaper. So the purpose of economic globalization as it's proceeding under corporate rules, is to allow the corporations and their corporate allies in government to conspire against workers, consumers, citizens at large. Julie Light: Judith, the issue of democracy certainly within the WTO has been raised--you just raised it--the corporations are very much at the table. They very much have the ear of the official trade representatives. Where is labor? Is there a voice for labor at the meeting? Judith Barish: Well, some non-governmental organizations including some unions and some representatives from the AFL-CIO are accredited to be inside the hall in Seattle when the ministerial meeting takes place in December. But they don't have an official role other than being accredited, non-governmental organizations. By in large, unions, environmental groups, citizen groups and consumer groups have been kept out. They don't have access to the deliberations of WTO panels and the body as a whole, and in fact often are not even allowed to submit amicus briefs in WTO cases. So for example, Public Citizen in Washington, which submitted a brief on one of the environmental disputes, had it sent back from Geneva in the mail with a request that they not interfere. Norman Solomon: We're talking about a global summit in Seattle at the end of November and early December of 1999. WTO has come out of years, or even really decades of GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. I'm wondering what you think conceptually has been, at least in theory, the role of labor for GATT and now WTO, according to the designers of these institutions? Judith Barish: That's an interesting question. As you know, the World Trade Organization or . . . GATT was created in 1948 as part of the negotiations that formed the United Nations and the other international organizations that are a part of the international terrain today. One of the early drafts for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade called for it to protect labor rights. And made a list of labor rights that should be protected: the right to form a union, associations of various sorts. That draft, you won't be surprised to hear, was rejected and nothing came out of that. And GATT has existed, and now the WTO mostly exists to protect the interests of corporations and those who would profit economically and financially from global trade. There have been repeated interventions by folks at the political level asking for more input for workers' rights. The United States Congress has on several different occasions passed resolutions saying that labor rights should be part of our trade policy. So far, almost nothing has come of that in international. . . in the negotiations around the Trade Organization. Norman Solomon: Is there an international pact in a trade context that guarantees labor rights? Judith Barish: There are a number of international treaties in which countries pledge their support for labor rights. For example, the right to join a union, the right to representation on the job, health and safety, basic wages, and so on. The United States is not a signatory to many of these treaties and has come under criticism from a lot of other countries for refusing to sign onto international treaties protecting labor rights. The International Labor Organization is the closest thing there is to an international body designed to protect workers' rights. However, the U.S. does not sign onto it, and furthermore, it has no enforcement power. So unlike the World Trade Organization, which can slap huge economic sanctions or levy fines against countries that violate intellectual property laws, for example, there are no remedies in the global economy for people who punish workers through prison labor, child labor, lack of minimum wage, etc. So for example, a law that was proposed by Tom Harkin in the United States Congress, that would make products of child labor illegal to be imported into the United States, would itself be illegal under the WTO. That would count as an illegal trade barrier because it would be discriminating against the goods of another country on the basis of how those goods were produced. Norman Solomon: Going back maybe a half dozen years when the NAFTA proposal was being debated in Congress, when these objections were raised over environmental protection or labor rights, we kept hearing from the White House, that we shouldn't worry because there were going to be side agreements. And I wonder, is there such an animal as a side agreement for the WTO? Judith Barish: Well, we said at the time of NAFTA, that the side agreements weren't worth the paper they were written on, and I think we may have overestimated their value. Um. . . however, the conservatives and free traders took another lesson out of NAFTA, which is, that they're never going to let themselves be hamstrung by these pesky side agreements again. And it is unlikely that there would even be language in the World Trade Organization that would protect what we've been calling for, which is core labor and environmental standards. That's considered weak as it has been in the past. That's considered too much of a restraint on free trade. Phillip Babich: Judith Barish, former communications director of the California State AFL-CIO. Julie Light: You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you would like to get in touch with us, we'll be giving out our toll free number at the end of this broadcast. Phillip Babich: When the World Trade Organization meets later this year, member countries may consider whether to eliminate tariffs for forest products, roll-back environmental regulations and make forests more accessible to multinational timber companies. Paige Fischer is with the Pacific Environment and Resources Center, an environmental group that tracks trade and forest policy. She says that the process of economic globalization has already had a devastating impact on the environment. Deregulation and the elimination of tariffs, adds Fischer, is driving destructive industrial development projects. Paige Fischer: We are convinced that the World Trade Organization and its negotiations on forest products are going to result in a significant increase in consumption--global consumption of forest products. And we fear that this is going to result in increased pressure on forest ecosystems, especially old growth, or frontier forest ecosystems. And then second, we fear that the WTO is going to invalidate many of the regulations that protect our forests. Things like export bans on logs, eco-labelling, regulations on log imports that prevent dangerous pests and diseases from coming into the U.S. or being imported to other countries. Those are the two main things that we fear. Julie Light: And in fact your organization, the Pacific Environment and Resources Center, is one of a number of groups that's bringing suit against the World Trade Representative because you say industry is at the table, but the environmental groups are not. Can you talk a little bit about that lawsuit? Paige Fischer: Yes, we filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Trade Representative and the Department of Commerce last month over the unequal access that we have to determining the negotiations on forest products. In fact, it's industry groups, corporations like Boise Cascade, and Weyerhaeuser that have almost exclusive access to determining what kinds of policies the U.S. is going to promote at the World Trade Organization regarding forests. Norman Solomon: Well, Paige, we've heard a lot from the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, or U.S. Department of Commerce, that trade barriers need to be knocked down, and I'm sure we'll hear a lot about that at the WTO summit in Seattle. What's wrong with that perspective that we need to deal with the issue of the export of logs, raw logs for instance, from that standpoint of: Hey, trade barriers have to come down. Paige Fischer: Well, I think the rationale at the U.S. Trade Representative is that wealthy countries take care of their ecosystems. And that trade liberalization is going to increase wealth around the world, and more countries are going to have more money, and they're going to have more educated populations, and everybody will want to care for their forests. But if we look at the experience here in the United States or in Canada, we know that that is not true. And then second of all, we think that the reason why the U.S. and other countries want to get rid of different kinds of regulations are to give corporations more access to forest resources and more control over what kinds of resources are being traded, what kinds of forest products are being traded, and where they come from. And we think there need to be regulations in place, especially if we want to promote more responsible or fair kinds of trade. Trade in certified forest products. Forest products that are certified by organizations like the Forest Stewardship Council as being sustainably harvested, or as not being from old-growth ecosystems. We need to promote regulations that insure a fair and sustainable international wood trade, not deregulation, or the elimination of regulations, basically which end up giving corporations free reign over the international wood trade. Norman Solomon: On a lot of those issues, at least the image is in the media is quite often that the WTO is pretty much an honest broker. You don't seem to share that perspective. Paige Fischer: Well, I don't because it's not balanced. It's really only governments that can play an official role in these negotiations. But on the side, they're consulting with industry groups more than they're consulting with citizen groups. In the United States we have these industry sector advisory committees that are formally a part of the U.S. Trade Representative. The USTR refers to these corporations, Boise Cascade, Weyerhaeuser, International Paper, for advice. We know that the World Trade Organization is not balanced, and that corporations influence the agenda, and we also know that at the dispute committee of the World Trade Organization, there are--there is no room for NGOs or for scientists necessarily, or for environmental groups, or citizens. Phillip Babich: Paige Fischer, with the Pacific Environment and Resources Center. Another central issue expected to be discussed at the WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle is agriculture. Member countries may consider whether to reduce import tariffs and allow multinational agribusinesses greater access to foreign markets. The WTO may also decide to do away with what the Clinton administration views as "unnecessarily rigid labeling requirements." Large companies such as Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and Monsanto are heavily invested in these trade negotiations. Food policy analysts say that these and other agribusiness giants are promoting what's known as an "export model" in agriculture. That is, companies set up farms in foreign countries and often grow single crops -- sometimes genetically engineered -- and chemically treat the soil, water and plant supplements. The final products are then sold on the open market internationally. According to Peter Rosset, director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First, this export model is having serious repercussions for food distribution. In some cases, developing countries are exporting food rather than feeding their hungry. Peter Rosset: We call hunger: the paradox of plenty. Hunger amidst abundance. There's enough food to feed every man, woman and child on the planet, probably two times over. So the problem isn't how to produce enough food; the problem is how to guarantee people access to that food. And that means attacking poverty and inequality. And the primary cause of increasing poverty and inequality in today's world is the tendency toward free trade and globalization. Julie Light: There's some people who argue that food production, like health care delivery for example, is so critical and so important, and can be considered a basic human right, that corporations and massive agri-industries shouldn't be allowed to be in the business of producing food. Peter Rosset: Well, I think one of the principal reasons why there's so many people who go without amidst so much plenty is precisely because of corporate control over our food system and increasing concentration of more and more elements of food production processing and distribution in the hands of fewer and fewer global corporations. They send their products to the consumers in the world who are best able to pay. They do not take into account human need, and I guess that's the fundamental flaw with the global marketplace: it responds to money rather than to people. Julie Light: What would, or how would returning food production to small scale, to small farming to peasant farming. . . why is that more equitable, why does that take human rights more into account? What would it look like? Peter Rosset: This is the principal focus of our research at Food First right now. It is what are the advantages or functions that small farms play? And we've done a lot of examination of this. We have data from almost all countries in the world, and in every country we've looked at, small farms are at least 100% more productive per unit area than large corporate farms. Small farmers are much better producers; we also find that they're more efficient economically, and we find that they're much better stewards of natural resources in terms of preventing soil erosion and maintaining the ecological sustainability of production. So we're basically at a crossroads right now at the end of the millennium, in terms of the future of food production in the world. One way is the way of Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland, which is the greater concentration of our food system. It's genetically modified food, pesticides, fertilizer, free trade in which poor countries become dependent on agricultural surpluses from the North, in which the large corporate farm, which is so inefficient, and so destructive to natural resources, will dominate. The other way is to take a step back from this free trade mania and to say, Wait a minute. There is a better way. It works all over the world; it's much more sustainable, and that's to put food production back into the hands of small farmers. In fact, to the extent that the poor themselves are involved in food production, then automatically that has a positive benefit in terms of dealing with hunger. Julie Light: Well, let's talk about the United States for a moment, because we don't have to go to Mexico or India or other parts of the world to look at corporate agriculture and industrial farming. Some states like Nebraska, for example, have actually tried to pass laws to prevent corporations from being in the business of farming. Is this just a pipe dream, or is this something that could happen? Peter Rosset: No, I think it's very important. And I think that we're at a particular historical moment in which it can definitely happen. If we go back to the great anti-trust movement in this country at the end of last century and at the beginning of this century, it was farmers being driven out by corporate control and agriculture that ignited a populous grassroots response against monopolies across the country. It was basically a rural rebellion that caused Congress and the White House to engage in trust-busting and the first big trust to be broken up were the agricultural trusts. The book by Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, about the meat industry, was a classic piece of journalism that fueled that movement to bust the big monopolies. With the farm crisis that we have now at the end of the millennium being the worst farm crisis since the end of the last millennium, we've been out talking to American farmers, and American farmers say, the number one problem they face is the growing monopoly control, once again in agriculture. Our government has become lax in enforcing antitrust legislation. Where a grain grower in the Midwest could have a choice of ten or twelve different grain elevators offering competing prices to sell his or her grain, they now find that every grain elevator in their area is owned by the same company, either ADM or Cargill, depending on where you are. There's no competition; the prices are artificially low, and farmers are being driven out of business. Farmers say they want trust-busting, they want an anti-monopoly movement in agriculture. Once before, 100 years ago, farmers sparked a movement that really did bust the big trusts. Now it's time to take their lead once again and get to it. Julie Light: Peter, how can small farmers, campesinos, peasants really make their voices heard at the WTO? Peter Rosset: Well, I think they've got to make sure that their representatives are there. And I think they are doing so. There's a lot of international organizations that group together small farmers and group together farmworkers' unions from around the world. All of them are very upset about what's going on in Seattle at the WTO. One for example, called Via Campesina groups together farmers' organizations in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Asia Pacific, etc. They've made it their number one priority for this year to express their dissatisfaction with the proposed further trade liberalization or free trade in agriculture because they see it as the greatest threat to their lifestyle and to their economic well-being. Phillip Babich: Peter Rosset of Food First, speaking with Norman Solomon and Julie Light. That's it for this edition of Making Contact: A Look at the World Trade Organization. Thanks for listening. But before we go, we'd like to tell you about a special series on the WTO ministerial in Seattle. During the five day summit, the National Radio Project will be collaborating with the Institute for Public Accuracy and Corporate Watch to broadcast live, one-hour daily programs from Seattle. The collaborative project is called World Trade Watch and it will be hosted by Norman Solomon and Julie Light. If you'd like more information on these broadcasts please call World Trade Watch at (510) 251-1077. (repeat). You can also call the National Radio Project. Our toll free number will be given out in a moment. Laura Livoti is our managing director. Peggy Law is executive director. Stephanie Welch is associate producer. Our production assistant is Shereen Meraji. Din Abdullah is archivist. Norman Solomon is senior advisor. Our national producer is David Barsamian. And I'm your host and managing producer Phillip Babich. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. That's 800-529-5736. Making Contact is an independent production. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs, we'd like to hear from you. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. 'Bye for now. |