VIEWPOINT | November 21, 2001
International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations Rampe du Pont-Rouge, 8, CH-1213 Petit-Lancy (Switzerland) tel: + 41 22 793 22 33, fax + 41 22 793 22 38, e-mail: iuf@iuf.org - www.iuf.org
president: Frank Hurt, general secretary: Ron Oswald, press officer: Peter Rossman
Geneva - There can be little doubt about the outcome of the WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha. Dressed up in the language of a "development round" and rhetorical invocations of the commitment to poverty-alleviation is a significant victory for the proponents of corporate globalization. On the key issue of integrating core labour standards into the rules and procedures of the WTO, the Ministerial Declaration merely "reaffirmed" its ambiguous declaration made at the 1996 Singapore Conference and "took note" of the "work under way" at the ILO. In short, the right of workers everywhere to defend themselves through collective organizing remains completely outside the rules governing world trade. China's membership in the WTO, which eventually will come to be regarded as the crucial event at Doha, serves as a grim reminder that the WTO is not merely silent on this issue. The accession of China must be seen as positive affirmation of the unlimited right of WTO member states to repress workers and elevate union busting to the level of national policy.
The conference declaration on intellectual property rights and the global AIDS/public health crisis does little beyond codifying existing practices, and concedes that the world's poorest countries and those with no pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity will not benefit. The section on "Trade and Environment" (aimed at "enhancing the mutual supportiveness of trade and environment") calls for negotiations on "the reduction, or, as appropriate, elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services", i.e. placing natural resources on the corporate auction block. The sections on "Trade and Investment" encourage the move towards a comprehensive, MAI-type all-encompassing charter of multinational investor rights inside the WTO. And the vague language on the reduction of agricultural export subsidies contains neither concrete commitments nor specific timetables.
The WTO describes the new round of trade negotiations agreed to at Doha as "broad and balanced". It is difficult to dissent from this view, provided we treat it as a broad and balanced growth of corporate power at the expense of democratic and trade union rights. These benefits for transnational investors come at the expense of the right of nations to exercise democratic control over their development models and their food resources, of the human right to food and medicine, and of the right to protect the environment from corporate plunder.
Despite the talk about "tough compromises", the Doha conference brought substantial gains for the corporate agenda and little for ours. If we gained a single toehold on which future progress might be based, it is contained in paragraph 31 of the Ministerial Declaration, which agrees to negotiations in the coming trade round on "the relationship between existing WTO rules and specific trade obligations set out in multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs)." In other words, international agreements on the environment may, under certain circumstances, take precedence over the rules governing global commerce.
There is no reason, however, to limit the priority of common concerns to the environment. Should not workplace and consumer safety, for example, or the right of workers to independent trade unions, or the right to manage environmental or genetic resources and public services for the common good also take priority over WTO regulations? In other words, global trade must be regulated in the interests of society as a whole. And that means digging in for a sustained mobilization by the whole of the international labour movement to challenge the legitimacy of the current rules and institutions governing world trade and to implement a program of our own.
The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) is an international trade union federation composed of 336 trade unions in 120 countries with an affiliated membership of 2.5 million members. It is based in Geneva, Switzerland.VIEWPOINT:
