Alternative Globalization Addressing Peoples and Earth

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Within the WTO, its member governments from the South:
• have resisted moves to expand the reach of “trade” rules into areas
like investment and competition;
• have demanded the right to revisit rules whose devastating implications
are only now becoming apparent;
• their resistance risks self-defeat if the same objectives are secured
through bilateral and regional investment agreements.
Free trade agreements rely on privatization, deregulation and liberalization
policies that are central planks of neo-liberal structural adjustment
programmes. Competition now permeates the whole world. Schools and
universities compete for pupils, culture and sports, consumers rival each
other in rampant consumerism, and states compete to attract investment
and capital. In almost all spheres everywhere, co-operation has been
replaced by competition, the public domain is rolled back and transferred
to private, often monopoly and transnational corporate control. Problems
are superficially addressed as a lack of finance. This does not address the
root causes of the problems. This dovetails with the United Nations’
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Promises to reduce poverty by
half and deliver universal education, promote gender equality, provide
access to clean water and combat HIV/AIDS by 2015 ring hollow when
they are to be delivered through the commercial market mechanisms that
create the very inequities being addressed.
Nowhere is the bias of the WTO towards major powers and transnational
corporations more unreasonable than in the monopolies over life-saving
drugs that it guarantees to pharmaceutical companies. The much-heralded
interpretation of the WTO’s agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPS) in relation to health and medicines - that was
forced on the EU and US by global campaigns and resisted by the Brazilian,
South African and Indian governments - purports to allow the world’s
poorest countries to import generic drugs. Sadly, this arrangement is so
complex that no government has been able to meet its terms.
The WTO’s treatment of countries seeking to join it makes its claim that
it is a just, rules-based organization totally meaningless. Rules only exist
on behalf of the powerful countries. Because all must agree, each country
has an effective veto over a country joining. In other words, they can
demand unreasonable terms. Vanuatu, for instance, was pressurized to
commit such an expensive list of services, including education, health,
environment, etc., that it decided the price was too high to proceed and
will only join if it can reopen the package.