TURN AROUND THE WTO Conference
Conway Hall, London, 26 September 1999

Ronnie Hall, Trade Co-ordinator, Friends of the Earth

The existing World Trade Organisation rules and agreements already have extensive environmental and social impacts, but there are forthcoming negotiations planned to start in November which are going to increase its impact so I just want to go through all the impacts very briefly to give you an idea of what the WTO does. I want to carry out a little exercise, to shake you all up, because it's Sunday morning and you might need waking up, and to give you an idea of how the WTO actually affects you personally, your choices in life. So for all of you that can, I'd like you to stand up please. If you are a teacher, a doctor or a nurse, or you work in the education or medical professions, please sit down. If you work in the British film industry, please sit down. If you, or any members of your family, are small farmers in the UK, please sit down. If you have deliberately bought any GM free food in the last month, that's food that's not genetically modified, please sit down. If you know that the European Union has had a ban on imports of American beef t treated with hormones for the last eleven years, and are concerned that that ban is about to disappear, please sit down. (We've got two people left standing). If you work for a transnational company, please sit down. If you've ever bought anything that was labelled as being environmentally or socially friendly, please sit down. (Everyone has sat down).

If you're a journalist, please stand up. OK, we know who you are now.

Now the thing is that all of you who are sitting down, the choices that you have made, are or are going to be, affected by the WTO. For the journalists who are standing up, you're due for some good stories in the next few months, so you should be quite happy.

In November, in Seattle, the governments of the WTO are actually going to meet to talk about starting a Millennium Round of trade negotiations. They have what's called a built-in agenda. (This is all a bit technical, there is a briefing sheet and various other materials outside so don't worry about writing down all the horrible WTO acronyms, you can check them out afterwards). Governments have something called the built-in agenda, and these are issues that they have already agreed to talk about or look at again, after the end of the Uruguay Round. These are issues that are going to be negotiated or looked at whatever happens, whether or not there is a Millennium Round, and they in themselves are extremely controversial, and the three big issues I think are agriculture, services and intellectual property rights. Agriculture is really the key thing.

I think what's happening at the moment, is that the European Union and the United States have very big service sectors. They want to increase markets around the world for their service sectors, so that's one key factor. The other key fact is that the European Union and Japan have heavily subsidised agriculture (and in fact the US does, but it's not quite relevant for this point) and the US and a number of countries around the world called the Cairns group of countries, which includes Australia, New Zealand, and a number of developing countries, are out to target subsidies in the European Union and Japan. So, the existing agreement on agriculture in the WTO and these forthcoming negotiations could have really dramatic impacts on farming in this country and in every country that is a member of the WTO (that's about 134 countries at the moment). It's a big problem for small farmers in the North and the South, and farmers have finally twigged that they are all in the same boat, and that the only people that are benefiting from the WTO's agreement on agriculture are the transnational agricultural industries.

There's a wonderful agreement in the WTO called TRIPS, which is trade related intellectual property rights, which governs patents and copyrights and effectively means that US-style patent rights are forced on other countries that are members of the WTO. There have been some big battles going on, for instance between the US and India, about whether India can continue to produce cheap food and cheap medicines because it will not, or has not in the past, introduced patent legislation that suits US companies.

Services, this is going to be a key issue as well. It's quite hard to work out exactly what's going on with all these negotiations because governments meet in secret and it's very hard to get the information out of them. You have to pick bits of information from here and there and try and put it together like a jigsaw puzzle, but what we think is happening with services is that the US government wants the service sector, that is every service industry in every country that is a member of the WTO, to be brought into this new round of negotiations, and that will have incredible environmental and social impacts if that happens. What we could see, for example, (and this is why I mentioned teaching and the medical profession) is the liberalisation of those sectors, the public provision of education and health services. Also public broadcasting, and the film industry, water services, tourism, energy services, you name it, it's in there. But how many people that work in those services have heard of the WTO, let alone know what governments are planning for them? So, although I can't really tell you exactly what's going to happen, I really think you should all try and keep an eye on the subject, so that we don't let them get away with it, basically.

Banning imports of GM crops and seeds, and banning beef that's been produced by hormones. Another wonderful WTO agreement (this is a real mouthful) is the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement, which for short is called the SPS. Now it's not really listed but I think it probably will be open for negotiation; it's very closely related to agriculture, because what it does, it's an international agreement about harmonising food standards around the world. So it deals for example with imports of food, controlling pests and diseases, keeping them out of the country, and the safety standards for food. Unfortunately it has two big drawbacks. The first of these is that it authorises a little known organisation (another one) called the Codex Alimentarious Commission (which we call Codex for short) which is heavily dominated by industry, to set international food standards. As a government, you must, if you can, use those food standards. If you're not going to use them, if you're going to introduce higher standards, you have to have a jolly good, sound, scientific reason for doing that. It doesn't matter if your consumers don't want to eat the food. It doesn't matter if you have people in your country who have ethical objections to eating genetically modified food. That just does not count under the SPS. So what's happening at the moment is that, as you probably know, the EU and the US are having a dispute, or a series of disputes, about various different products but it's all related to this SPS agreement and the use of the precautionary principle, and what's happened with beef is that the European Union has had this ban in place for eleven years, and the US has decided to challenge it, has done so, and it's been supported by the World Trade Organisation. As a result there are now about $117 million worth of trade sanctions in place against particular EU industries. The way that the WTO works is very interesting. The US decides which countries in Europe it really wants to put the most pressure on, picks a sector that has nothing to do with the dispute, so that, for example in this case they've put sanctions on exports of Danish pork and Roquefort cheese from France, so the farmers that are involved in producing these goods feel completely hard done by because it's nothing to do with them. On the other hand the UK government has said it disapproves of the European Union's ban, so we don't have any sanctions on any UK sectors. So it's all highly political, and as you may have heard, the farmers in France aren't taking it lying down. They've trashed Macdonalds, and some of them have spent several weeks in prison. Now they've been let out, to the applause of the French government, who have invited them to go to Seattle with the French delegation, and said that their cause is just, so keep an eye on France as well.

There is another agreement called the Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement, the TBT, that is very similar to the SPS Agreement, but it deals with international standards. Any standard, anywhere in the world, (so long as the country is a member of the WTO), that interferes with trade, can be classed as a technical barrier to trade, because trade takes priority over everything else. The TBT Agreement covers labelling, and industry is out to get ecolabels, it's one of their priorities. The Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement is up for review, so there's going to be an interesting debate there. I don't know what the consequences will be but if you took it right to the extreme, it could be the case that whatever we want to buy or eat cannot tell if it is genetically modified, you will not know if it's organic, and you might not even be able to buy a fairly traded product.

I'm just going to cover a couple of things very briefly and then I'll stop. Multilateral Environmental Agreements do actually, some of them do come into conflict with trade rules. There has never been a conflict, a dispute, brought to the WTO about these agreements, called MEAs. However some of you may know that earlier this year, an international negotiation that was designed to regulate handling and safe transfer of genetically modified organisms, called the biosafety protocol, collapsed, and the reason (it has actually started up again now) it collapsed was because of arguments from free traders about these standards interfering with trade. There is a group of six countries, led by the US, who export genetically modified crops, who are out to make sure they do not lose their markets, and this way they're going to do it, they're going to do in the WTO. But crucially, the European Union, supported by a few other countries including Japan has proposed a complete raft of new issues to go into a round. Now the reason that we think that this is happening is because the European Union and Japan want to hide agriculture in the middle of a long list of issues, so that they don't have to make too many concessions, because they're really worried about what their farmers are going to think, so they're just adding as many issues as they can think of, literally, which is not good news.

The ones I wanted to talk about very quickly are environment. The European Union is proposing to have negotiations on trade and environment, but developing countries are resisting. Even if the agenda items that they have actually picked get through the Seattle meeting, I do not personally expect anything to come out of it, because they've been discussing environment for a long time and they've never got anywhere; they just can't agree on the issues.

And the same goes for labour. The United States is trying to propose that labour standards are considered by the WTO; it's under a lot of pressure from the unions, it's also under a lot of pressure from the other side, from developing countries, who don't want it discussed. The US is also rumoured to be trying to introduce a negotiation to have zero tariffs on forest products, which could be very serious in terms of loss of rainforest because it could mean an increase of 3 - 4% in consumption of forest products. We don't know exactly what's going to happen. They originally wanted to have it signed, sealed and delivered before Seattle but it may become part of a round, and finally our old friend biotechnology is going to be in there somewhere, but everybody's being very cagey about exactly where.

That's it for the technical stuff. Now I just wanted to say this is all a bit alarmist in a way, it's very worrying, but there's been quite a phenomenal shift of opinion at the ground level around the world. Barry mentioned the statement opposing the Millennium Round which has been circulating on the Internet since March. It's now been signed by 1,114 organisations from 87 countries around the world. Governments are extremely aware of it and being very defensive. I expect most of you have heard of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, which collapsed last year. The UK government received 20,000 letters about that. Now they weren't the government that was responsible for the MAI collapsing, but when the French government withdrew, they knew they had 20,000 letters, and they backed off, quite easily. So it really does matter at the moment, what individuals do. All the organisations represented at this table have signed up to the statement and in the UK we have a target of 50,000 letters to MPs and Whitehall, so if you do anything, please, please write a letter to your MP. I just wanted to say, to finish off on an optimistic note, I really think that we're on the crest of a wave here, and public opinion is changing, and the next five to ten years are going to be extremely interesting.