Agence France Presse | BY DAVID WILLIAMS | September 3, 2003
Anti-globalization forces are looking to a WTO trade conference in Mexico as a potential milestone in a movement that burst onto the world stage in Seattle in 1999.
Mexican peasants are being bussed in to join seasoned activists fighting to reverse the process of globalization at World Trade Organization ministerial talks in Cancun, Mexico from September 10 to 14.
Protest numbers were impossible to specify.
Mexico has officially authorized 980 non-governmental organizations, with about 3,000 activists.
But protest organizers also have been asking on the Internet for contributions to pay for hard-hit Mexican peasant farmers, many of whom bitterly oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement, to join in a global day of protest, set for September 13.
The Mexican authorities have mobilized an estimated 20,000 security personnel.
"We hope there won't be any violence and, speaking to many organizations, they are in favor of peaceful demonstrations," said Mexican foreign ministry official Melba Pria, speaking to AFP in Mexico.
The location of the talks in the beach resort of Cancun has lowered expectations of a Cancun rally on the scale of Seattle, when an attempt to launch a new round of trade talks four years ago collapsed spectacularly.
"I don't think we are going to see a Seattle because of the remoteness of Cancun from the rest of the country and how easily it is controlled by the authorities," said Soren Ambrose, activist and consultant with Fifty Years is Enough Network.
The cost of the trip to Cancun was also prohibitive for many people in Mexico, he said.
But the WTO may be heading for a brick wall anyway, activists hope, with negotiations foundering since the WTO papered over differences to launch a new trade round at Doha, Qatar, in November 2001.
Member countries were divided over how to liberalize trade in agriculture, and services and whether even to discuss new rules on investment, said Global Trade Watch director Lori Wallach.
The plight of the trade talks revealed more than festering disagreements on narrow trade issues, she said. Rather, it underscored a deep flaw in the WTO and its aims.
"A handful of countries want the WTO to be a system of global governance (but) the majority of organizations and members want the WTO to stick to its knitting and focus on trying to improve the terms of trade between countries, not mess with laws within the countries," Wallach said.
The WTO was interfering in areas best left to individual countries in a misguided attempt to bring uniformity to the global trading system, she said, calling on the organization to reform.
"One key step to take is to dramatically pare down the scope of the so-called trade agreement to focus on trade -- a new idea -- and get out of the business of trying to set one-size-fits-all rules on an array of countries' domestic policies from public services to food safety."
One activist who won't be joining the fight in Cancun is high-profile French anti-globalization campaigner Jose Bove, who was released from prison last month.
A judge in the southern French town of Millau on Monday followed a recommendation made last week by the public prosecutor by rejecting Bove's application to leave the country for Cancun.
Upon hearing the verdict, the 50-year-old campaigner quipped: "I'll be in Cancon," a small village of fewer than 2,000 residents in southwestern France where a "counter-summit" is being planned.Agence France Presse:
