Getting to grips with the World Trade Organisation (WTO)

Purpose
The WTO was established in 1995 as part of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. It is the only international organisation charged with enforcing a set of rules to govern international trade, including the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and the Agreement on Agriculture, (AoA) among others.

Membership
The WTO is made up of 142 member countries and 32 nations with observer status. The WTO Director-General is currently Mike Moore of New Zealand but he will be replaced by Supachai Panitchpakdi from Thailand in September 2002.

Secretariat
The WTO Secretariat is made up of over 500 staff in a Geneva office. Like civil servants, they carry out work on behalf of the WTO members. The Secretariat's budget for 2000 was approximately £35 million. Ministerial meetings The WTO's ministerial conference, which includes all member nations and meets every two years, is the WTO's highest authority. The last (3rd) ministerial took place in Seattle and this one (4th) is taking place in Doha, Qatar November 9-13th.

Democracy
Officially, decisions in the WTO are made by voting or consensus. In practice, they are dominated by rich countries, especially the G7 countries (US, Canada, Japan and the European Union) who have repeatedly made key decisions in closed meetings. Also, some 30 WTO member countries cannot afford an office in Geneva, and few developing countries are able to attend the 40 to 50 ongoing trade meetings held in an average week.

Trade rounds
A trade round refers to the linking together of trade negotiations on different issues over a period of years, in order that member countries can make trade-offs between different agreements. The EU is pushing for a new round of negotiations to be agreed in Qatar, which would include new issues (such as investment). Expanding the WTO's remit to cover yet more issues will worsen the capacity problem experienced by developing countries and will extend the WTO's rules into more sensitive areas of government policy.

Rule enforcement
WTO rules are enforced via the Dispute Settlement Process. Countries are allowed to challenge each others' laws and regulations if they violate WTO rules. Cases are then decided by a panel of three trade bureaucrats, who often have little appreciation of government responsibility to protect workers, the environment or human rights. Poor countries do not have the political or economic clout to challenge rich nations when they flout their commitments.

The Tricks of the Trade
How trade rules are loaded against the poor International trade in goods and services is worth over £11.5bn a day, but it is rich countries and their multinationals who reap the vast majority of the benefits. The rules that currently govern world trade currently discriminate against the poor ­ the poorest 49 countries account for only 0.4% of world trade. Trade rules also favour big business, with 70% of world trade being controlled by multinational corporations.
Two years ago, cracks in the world trading system and its governing body, the WTO, were spectacularly revealed. International trade talks collapsed - amidst mass protests and in full view of the world's media ­ at the WTO meeting in Seattle, in November 1999. This followed continues attempts by rich countries to push their agenda forward without regard to the concerns of developing countries or the environment and democracy.
At those talks, developing countries had pointed to the hypocrisy of rich nations pushing for more 'free trade' agreements whilst maintaining high import taxes on agriculture and textiles ­ products which poor countries are keen to export. They were also angry at being excluded from key discussions at meetings. Shocked by the way developing countries were marginalised at the talks, Secretary of State for Trade & Industry, Stephen Byers, acknowledged that "the WTO will not be able to continue in its present form. There has to be fundamental and radical change in order for it to meet the needs and aspirations of all 134 of its members."

'The UN estimates that poor countries lose a massive £1.3bn a day because of unjust trade rules ­ some 14 times the amount they receive in aid. Within these countries, it is often the poorest communities who lose out the most.'

Qatar: delegates in their gas masks (activists stay in their communities)

The powers-that-be are hoping against hope that Qatar will mark the start of a new global trade round. In a nice safe (they hope!) dictatorship, free from the stench of tear gas and shouts of dissent, the delegates will attempt to safeguard their own brand of freedom. The corporate lobbyists will be swept through security like visiting royalty, and into closed meetings to pour their sweet poison into the willing ears of national governments. Or maybe it'll be the other scenario, with delegates and lobbyists sheltering inside their air-con hotel rooms, switching nervously between CNN, Al-Jazeera (its Arabic equivalent), the Dow Jones and the gas mask lying on the bed?
This time, as always, trade barriers are planned to go under the knife. The conflict is between rich states keeping up their barriers in spite of previous agreements and poor states not wanting to lose any more of theirs. This ties in very nicely with advancing General Agreement on Trade and Services, or GATS, which translated means handing over any surviving public services ­ water, power, hospitals, schools, public transport - to the ever-famished corporations. Of course, poor people can't afford all this, so they'll die in droves, but hey ­ this is states talking to each other. You can be sure the one thing they'll agree on, wherever they live, is staying fat by screwing the rest of us, all the while mouthing greasy platitudes about 'free trade feeding the poor'. No chance of the people who do the actual work and the actual starving to decide a solution that's in their interests of course.
The EU has bottled out of raising environmental issues in Qatar because the so-called Less Developed Countries' (LDC's) governments see it as 'protectionism'. (Environmental regulations would mean workers in LDC's wouldn't be allowed to be paid peanuts and get poisoned.) Pressure is building to force LDC's into an even greater takeover of their marketsby foreign companies which would wipe out their local businesses (communities?). And this in spite of the fact that 50% of WTO members are saying NO WAY.
It's the same story with public health ­ LDC governments want to be able to maintain their own public health systems. The US wants the opposite. The story is that the US is prepared to concede on HIV, but nothing else. (So why are they fighting Brazil and others to stop them producing generic HIV drugs?) This comes under so-called Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights, the scam by which a company claims ownership of anything from Basmati rice to bits of the human genome by registering a patent on it. And agricultural markets are set to be priced open in a three-way tussle between various vested interests.
At this distance, it looks as if delegates are under such monumental pressure from the US to agree a new round that any clause with a whiff of controversy will be left out. What they want above all, are satellite news pictures of gritty delegates shaking hands in the desert, sending a 'steady as she goes' message to world markets as they prepare to batten down the hatches. Because deep down they know damn well there's a hell of a storm whipping up.

Ideology separates us. Dreams and anguish bring us together...