Protokoll 2003 - Seko

member governments out there, and they are taken over years of correspondence
making offers to each other on how to liberalize trade, and
they are taken at the great conferences like the recent one at Cancún.
And so we are always in a situation where we have to try and affect those
discussions which take place in Geneva but where we need all of you,
all of our affiliates around the world, also to lobby their governments to
make sure that the voices of workers are heard in this global attempt to
deregulate services.
The failure of the Cancún conference is not really a victory for anybody.
It is in a sense a victory for the developing countries who finally have
learnt a trick which is to say to the developed countries: If you want
anything, you have to give us something back. They have highlighted the
problem of agriculture. Of course it is an obscene situation when, because
we subsidize sugar farmers in Europe, the workers who depend upon that
industry in the Caribbean are unemployed. It is an obscene situation when
we subsidize something like chicken farming in Belgium to such an extent
that the chicken industry in a country like Senegal in Africa is destroyed.
Somehow, politicians really have to put their minds to this issue. We cannot
create global justice unless the developing countries look seriously and
try to change this question of how the agricultural subsidies work,
particularly in Europe and in North America.
But while there was that setback in Cancún, make no mistake: The GATS
negotiations are continuing. We were very proud of the fact that before
Cancún, because of our lobbying, we got governments for the first time to
publish the offers which they were making to other countries. We got the
European Union to publish the offers which they were making to other
countries.
These offers are very important, because when a country makes an offer,
when it is taken up by another country, then the problem is that everybody
else in that WTO agreement is expected to live with it. They are expected
to have the same situation themselves. And those are situations where you
can find suddenly, however much you fight for sensible regulations in
your own country, that it can be completely overtaken by events outside,
because the WTO process is one which commits governments. Even if
individually they are not committed themselves because of the process,
they will be committed to this widespread liberalization.
So it is extremely important that we continue that fight at the international
level, but also that you at the national level continue that fight with your
government to make sure that they are saying the right things in these
GATS negotiations.
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