It's scary, it's full of jargon, and it's coming to a community near you...

What is GATS?
The General Agreement on Trade and Services was originally agreed by the WTO in 1994. The aim of this agreement is to remove any restrictions including internal government regulations which act as 'barriers to trade in the area of service delivery.'
Services have been defined as anything you can't drop on your foot! Our libraries, schools, hospitals, banks, rubbish collection and even the water that we clean our teeth with are all services that feed our daily lives.

In whose service?
The service industry is big business and heavily dominated by western corporations. These companies want to operate freely within the service sector, but much of it is owned and regulated by governments. Freeing up the trade in services will benefit business and the GATS is designed to do this. Unsurprisingly, corporations have been the driving force behind the agreement.

GATS negotiations
Negotiations are now underway which aim to extend the 1994 agreement. Governments are under pressure to drastically reorganise the ownership and delivery of services within their countries, and subject them to even tighter 'free trade' rules.
At the same time, negotiators from the world's richest countries are pushing for this liberalisation process to speed up. But the GATS negotiations are extremely complex and technical, putting many developing countries at a serious negotiating disadvantage, lacking the necessary capacity and/or technical expertise.

The poor lose out
The GATS liberalisation agenda threatens basic service delivery. If multinationals are seeking to make a profit out of water, health and education, those without purchasing power are likely to lose out. Recent water privatisation in Puerto Rico has meant that poor communities have gone without water while US military bases and tourist resorts enjoy an unlimited supply. A system governed by people's ability to pay will not bring desperately needed services to the world's poorest people.

No going back
Moreover, the irreversibility of GATS will ensure that once governments have opened up particular service sectors to WTO rules, there's no going back. The decision of how to organise service delivery is effectively right to decide whether or not services should be regulated.

Time to take a stand
If GATS comes into force, what are now 'only' partly privatised hospitals, schools and London Underground would be likely to become 100% corporate entities, even if we had a government that opposed such a move. And though the GATS will have a profound impact on people all over the world, few people have even heard of it. (Their secret weapon ­ the more devastating the plan, the more deadly boring and acronym'ed they make it sound.) But it's not too late to change this creeping privatisation by the back door. GATS negotiations have only just begun; there's a huge amount of public anger surrounding the whole issue, and workers right across the public sector ­ eg. the RMT on London's Underground - are standing firm on this one. Those of us who believe in community-run services can find more than enough in common with those who are passionate about government ownership of essential services to make contact and maybe take action. It may be old language, but yet again it's solidarity and diversity that we need more than ever right now.

Songs of Resistance from Soweto

On a crisp morning at the beginning of June, the tape of South Africa's history appears to have been rewound to the time when the community protests that began to topple the apartheid regime were at their height. The Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) is on the march, led by veteran activist Trevor Ngwane, lifting his feet in the ritual dance of protest, through dusty streets.
The poor in the townships that have outstanding bills owing to the electricity utility Eskom being cut off. Before partial privatisation Eskom must become more profitable and lower the numbers in its debtors book. According to Ngwane: 'Our belief is that electricity is a right. We cannot afford to pay rates much higher than big business does. The system's in a mess.'
Ngwane has gone door to door, collecting information about conditions in Soweto, to help bolster the call to end electricity cut-offs. What he has seen is shocking. Most households in this metropolitan township earn less than R 800 ($100) a month; almost half the households surveyed survive on an old-age pensioner's payment of R 540 a month.
For Trevor Ngwane, electricity cut-offs in Soweto are easily located in the global economic diktat that services are better run on profit lines. As speculator George Soros admits: 'South Africa is in the hands of global capital. That's why it can't meet the legitimate demands of its people.'
For this reason, Ngwane has also brought his toyi toyi to Washington protests against the World Bank, the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the World Economic Forum meeting on South African soil in June 2001. Though at heart he is a community activist, he takes hope from a new wave of international protest against economic globalisation.
'Through international solidarity we were able to get rid of the apartheid regime. But now our freedom is coming to nought because of neoliberal policies of these institutions which undermine our freedom. We need solidarity to oppose these policies.'
And about the growing resistance on the home front, he explains: 'The point has been reached in South Africa where people have been pushed to struggle in defence of their standard of living. It happened under apartheid. When people are under pressure, they have no choice but to fight back.'
He adds: 'Organizations like the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee are small beginnings - of this we are under no illusions. But I am also aware that history can move in leaps and bounds.'
Soweto, the township that is a symbol of the struggle against apartheid, is the heart of the country ­ the real South Africa. It's dusty and mostly treeless, except for forlorn attempts at 'greening' ­ a ragged tree, a patch of grass dotted here and there.
A veteran anti-apartheid activist born and bred in Soweto, Ngwane was disciplined after he objected to the Government's World Bank-influenced development model for Johannesburg which involved privatisation (known here as 'corporatisation') of public services like electricity, water, parks and even the Zoo.
For the ANC has changed course and character from the liberation movement which took power on a wave of euphoria in 1994. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) began with a radical social-democratic policy. Its goals were one million houses, universal and affordable electricity, a national health scheme and social security.
But in 1996 the ANC was forced by powerful investors and the IMF to adapt itself to the 'realities' of the global economy. Since then, health, welfare, education, electrification and housing budgets have been slashed. Income disparity has actually increased since the end of apartheid, and around one in four South Africans are unemployed.
'There's been a shift in policy from a redistributive policy to a trickle-down policy,' says Ngwane. In a nutshell ­ if you can't pay, you can't have it. So he has moved from the inside of power, back to the outside, back to challenge, back to protest.
The struggle against apartheid is so recent that a proud culture of resistance is still latent in the townships, and it is this that is feeding the rumbling at the grassroots. Ngwane says: 'It's just like the old days. There's a defiance campaign, where people themselves reconnect electricity that's been cut off. It balances the power between Eskom and us, we contest their power to switch on and off.'
What strikes me now about all these protests is that we're so fresh out of political independence and it's amazing that people have shaken off the nationalist honeymoon so quickly,' he continues.
Trevor Ngwane is seeing that in every community the issues sparking people to march and to organise are different but the same. Different in detail, but they reflect the same needs. Many are allied to the Anti-Privatization Forum, of which Ngwane is secretary, a national forum that links a range of organisations which oppose various forms of privatisation and which assist with community struggles.
The new movement is nascent but has potential. Many were heavily involved in the protests against the global pharmaceutical giants and for affordable AIDS drugs, for example. In the port city of Durban, ANC veteran Fatima Meer helps to organise poor communities faced with evictions. She and other former ANC supporters have organised 'defenders of communities' ­ mobile groups who forcibly stop evictions. In April last year, for example, older women in the Chatsworth community surrounded and defended their homes against eviction ­ this became known as the Auntie's Revolt.

As an APF poem says: 'And the people shall continue shouting and fighting, Coz their daily reality is dominated by adversities.'

From an article by Ferial Haffajee. Reprinted from New Internationalist magazine - www.oneworld.org/ni/index4.html
APF: www.cosatu.org.za/samwu/apf.htm
Contact details: c/o AIDC,
3rd floor Cosatu House,
cnr Leyds and Biccard Streets,
Braamfontein,
Johannesburg,
SA.

News from Elsewhere
The grassroots Indian farmers movement has probably never been stronger. This new dynamic basically started in 1999 and is at least in part due to the InterContinental Caravan, an inter-continental journey born out of People's Global Action
In fact, the farmers hadn't worked at a national level at all since the campaign against GMOs that took place in 1996, and didn't really know about each other's situations. But the Caravan "brought a wider vision". Out of this, a thriving national network was set up. The first big national action took place in September 2000 in Bangalore. This year they have organised huge actions almost every month by rotation: 50000 oxcarts blocking the import of foreign grains in Bombay, 50,000 people encircled in barbed wire and arrested in New Delhi for civil disobedience. Other huge demos have been in Lucknow, Madras, Kerala and 250 to 300,000 people on October 2nd in Bangalore.
For the Qatar WTO ministerial they are expecting 500,000 people in New Delhi, on November 6 (and maybe another demo in the south), with the civil disobedience starting with free trains all across the continentŠsome farmers groups intend to liberate grain from the silos and redistribute it.
The aim is to take Indian agriculture, indeed all agriculture back out of WTO, and then the land, the air, the water, the goods and the services.