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annual meeting in the small ski­resort town of Davos in the Swiss Alps.
According to the WEF, their meeting is now considered to be the global summit
that defines the political, economic and business agenda for the year. Its 1982
annual meeting brought together the cabinet members of major countries with
heads of international organisations such as the World Bank, IMF and GATT.
This special informal gathering of trade ministers from 17 countries organised
the launch of the Uruguay Round, which is where the WTO was founded.
World Trade Organization (WTO)
The WTO, founded in 1995, was created by the Uruguay Round negotiations
(1986–94) and grew out of GATT. The WTO, with its headquarters in Geneva,
has 139 member countries and was designed to remove barriers to trade. Child
labour, prison labour, forced labour, substandard wages and working
conditions are all permitted under the WTO. The organisation is also
undemocratic. In a speech made in May 2000, Martin Khor of the United
Nations Third World Network said, ‘The WTO has a system of decision­making
that at crucial moments has excluded most developing countries.’ 19
Organization for Economic Development (OECD)
The OECD was formed in 1961 and is made up of the 29 most powerful
economies on earth. In the 1970s the member states were all dominated by large
capital exporters and consequently shared US hostility to the continued
insistence of the developing world to set conditions upon foreign investment.
The seeds of the MAI (see page 000) were planted in the OECD in the 1960s.