From rcpd at mail1.info.com.ph Mon Jan 10 13:05:05 2000 From: rcpd at mail1.info.com.ph (rcpd@mail1.info.com.ph) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 12:05:05 +0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1377] ISGN Forums in Bangkok Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.20000110120505.007efcd0@mail.info.com.ph> Dear Friends, new year greetings! Below is the registration form and other documents for the: February 9-10: "Post-Seattle Forum on Trade and Agriculture---Advancing the Call to Take Agriculture Out of the WTO" and the February 12: "Forum on Trade, Finance Liberalization and Implications on the Debt Crisis" Please fill it up and send to us via email. The venue will be at the Chulalongkorn University in downtown Bangkok. Those who need a letter of invitation for visa purposes should inform us as soon as possible, including your fax number, so that we can send it you immediately. Also, below is an initial list of hotels/lodges located near Chulalongkorn and the UNCTAD X venue (Queen Sirikit Convention Hall) - c/o of FOCUS on Global South See you in Bangkok Jayson for ISGN ---------------------------- R E G I S T R A T I O N F O R M Kindly write your answers in BLOCK letters. First name: Last Name; Age: Sex: Nationality: Home Address: Languages Spoken: Name of organization: Name of organization (in English, where applicable): Address: Telephone number(s) Fax number: E-mail: Date of arrival in Bangkok: Check the ISGN Forums that you are attending ___ February 9-10 Post-Seattle Forum on Trade and Agriculture: Advancing the Call to Take Agriculture out of the WTO ___ February 12 Forum on Trade, Financial Liberalization and Implications on the Debt Crisis Are you also attending the February 7-8 UNCTAD NGO Plenary Caucus? ______ Do you need a letter invitation for visa purposes? _____ Please send your registration form to: Naty Bernardino ISGN-Manila c/o Resource Center for People's Development (RCPD) e-mail address: rcpd@info.com.ph isgn@tri-isys.com Tel/fax: (632)-436-18-31 or Alice Raymundo PKMM (National Association of Patriotic Peasants -Philippines) 26 Unit 4 La Salle St., Cubao, Quezon City, Philipines e-mail: alice@info.com.ph pkmm_phil@hotmail.com Tel/fax: (632)-912-39-62 or Nicola Bullard Focus on the Global South (FOCUS) c/o CUSRI, Chulalongkorn University Bangkok 10330 THAILAND Tel: 662 218 7363/7364/7365 Fax: 662 255 9976 E-mail: N.Bullard@focusweb.org Web Page http://www.focusweb.org ------------------- LIST OF ACCOMODATIONS: All are located close to the conference venue. Please be reminded to refer to Focus on the Global South for a special rate. White Lodge Tel : 662-216-8867 Fax : 662-215-3041 Room rates : Single US$ 10 Double US$ 11 Bangkok Christian Guest House Tel : 662-233-6303, 233-2206, 234-4983, 234-1852 Fax : 662-237-1742 Room rates : Single US$ 18 Double US$ 25 Krit Thai Mansion Tel : 662-215-3042, 215-2370, 215-2582 Fax : 662-216-2241 Room rates : Single/Double US$ 21 Jim's Lodge Tel : 662-255-3100, 255-0190-9 Fax : 662-253-8492 Room rates : Single US$ 23++ Double US$ 24++ Chom's Boutique Inn Tel : 662-254-0056, 254-2070-1 Fax : 662-254-0054-5 Room rates : Single/Double US$ 25 Asia Hotel Tel : 662-215-0808 Fax : 662-215-4360 Room rates : Single/Double US$ 44 Pathumwan Princess Tel : 662-216-3700-9, 216-3710-19, 216-3720-29 Fax : 662-216-3730-31, 216-3733 E-mail : ppb@dusit.com Room rates : Single US$ 49 Double US$ 54 Novotel Bangkok Tel : 662-255-6888 Fax : 662-255-1284 Website : www.hoteweb.fr Room rates : Single US$ 52 Double US$ 57 Montien Hotel, Bangkok Tel : 662-233-7060-9 Fax : 662-236-5218-9 E-mail : montien@ksc15.th.com Website :www.montien.com Room rates : Single US$ 57 Double US$ 73 Siam Inter-Continental Tel : 662-253-0355-57 Fax : 662-254-4804 E-mail : bangkok@interconti.com Website : www.interconti.com Room rates : Single US$ 76 Suite US$ 108 The Pan Pacific Bangkok Tel : 662-632-9000 Fax : 662-632-9011 E-mail : pphbsale@loxinfo.co.th Website : www.panpac.com Room rates : Single/Double US$ 88++ Note : All above rates are generally for room only. Please check with your travel agent, sometimes you can get good prices for airfare/accommodation packages. -------------------------------------- Dear Friends, If you happen to be in Bangkok for the UNCTAD X events in February, we are inviting you to participate in a series of NGO forum organized by the International South Group Network (ISGN): February 9-10: "Post-Seattle Forum on Trade and Agriculture---Advancing the Call to Take Agriculture Out of the WTO" (in cooperation with Focus on the Global South and PKMM-Philippines) February 12: "Forum on Trade, Finance Liberalization and Implications on the Debt Crisis" (in cooperation with Focus and Jubilee South) Please find below the program/theme of both forum. For reservations and more information, contact: Naty Bernardino ISGN-International Secretariat c/o Resource Center for People's Development rcpd@info.com.ph, isgn@tri-isys.com or Alice Raymundo PKMM-Philippines alice@info.com.ph, pkmm_phil@hotmail.com Post-Seattle Forum on Trade and Agriculture: Advancing the Call to Take Agriculture out of the WTO February 9-10, 2000 Bangkok, Thailand The massive street protests and collapse of the 3rd WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle highlighted the bankruptcy of the "free trade" dogma that rules the multilateral trading system. It was a significant advance in the people's struggle against the WTO especially since the US and other big players failed to introduce new issues into the domain of the WTO. The sharpening of contradictions within the WTO, most significantly the growing collective challenge posed by the developing and least developed nations is a positive development that has to be pushed and supported. However, even if the 3rd WTO ministerial meeting failed to agree on a broad agenda for a millenium round of negotiations, the trade body will resume talks on key areas such as agriculture, services, and intellectual property rights, as mandated under the 1994 Marrakesh agreement. Agriculture remains a contentious issue not only between the big players and developing nations but also among the developed nations themselves. Talks remain deadlocked between the US/Cairns Group and the EU on the issue of subsidies, and between the powerful and developing nations on the issue of market access and special and differential treatment, among others. Peasant movements worldwide have already put forward the call, Take Agriculture Out of WTO. The call aptly mirrors the position and perspective of small farmers, peasants and marginalized rural sectors who have been the worst victims of agricultural trade liberalization. It is a radical departure from simply pleading the WTO for more export market access in favor of developing countries or dismantling subsidies in the North to make third world exports competitive. Small farmers in the third world do not gain anything from increased exports. Only big agribusiness TNCs and the local landed elite benefit from it. In fact, it is the orientation towards export agriculture that has made the third world perpetually underdeveloped and which has exacerbated peasant landlessness, food insecurity and environmental degradation. On February 12-19, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development will hold its tenth quadrennial conference in Bangkok. Since the WTO came to existence, big players in the global trading regime have sidetracked the vital link of trade to development, relegating such concerns to the UNCTAD. While it is a non-binding trade body in contrast to the WTO, the UNCTAD has more or less served as a forum of developing nations to raise development issues in relation to trade. The aftershock from Seattle is bound to shape the outcome of UNCTAD X . It will be worthwhile to observe and explore possibilities of pushing developing nations into firming up a collective position in support of people's demands in Seattle. >From Seattle to Bangkok and then on to Geneva, we should not let our guards down and vigorously oppose all moves by the US and other big economic powers to pursue their failed agenda in Seattle. We must support the call to get agriculture out of the WTO even as we find ways of pushing the processes of the WTO towards emasculating its hold on key and related issues around agriculture and stopping further liberalization of third world economies. We must work for a united front of all developing and least developed nations in fighting for national economic sovereignty and genuine development. Tentative Program: February 9 (Wednesday) 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Opening and Welcome Remarks: Assembly of the Poor (Thailand) ISGN Focus on the Global South Plenary Forum I: The WTO Fiasco in Seattle: Analysis and Prospects - Dr. Walden Bello UNCTAD and Which Way Forward for Developing Nations - Dr. Yash Tandon Lessons from Seattle and Challenges on People's Struggles and Movements - Dr. Alejandro Bendana February 10 (Thursday) 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon Plenary Forum II: The Political Economy of Trade Liberalization in Agriculture - Francisco Pascual The WTO Review of the Agreement on Agriculture: Issues and Problems - IATP The Global Farmers' Campaign to Take Agriculture Out of the WTO - La Via Campesina Lunch Break: 12:00 - 1:30 p.m. Plenary Forum III: Perspective and Positions of Farmers and Peasant Organizations 1. Brazil 2. Africa 3. Philippines 4. Mexico 5. India 6. Norway 7. USA Synthesis and Closing Remarks ------------------------------- The forum is being organized by the International South Group Network (ISGN) in cooperation with Focus on the Global South. For more information, contact: Naty Bernardino ISGN-Manila c/o Resource Center for People's Development (RCPD) e-mail address: rcpd@info.com.ph or isgn@tri-isys.com Tel/fax: (632)-436-18-31 or Alice Raymundo PKMM (National Association of Patriotic Peasants -Philippines) e-mail: alice@info.com.ph or pkmm_phil@hotmail.com Tel/fax: (632)-912-39-62 ------------------ International South Group Network (ISGN) Forum on Trade, Financial Liberalization and Implications on the Debt Crisis February 12, 2000 Bangkok, Thailand 9:00 a.m.- 12:00 noon Welcome and Opening Remarks Alejandro Benda?a (ISGN/ Jubilee South) Plenary I : Trade Liberalization and Debt Panelists: Yash Tandon (SEATINI/ISGN) Eric Toussaint (CADTM-Belgium) Martin Khor (Third World Network) Lunch Break: 12:00 - 1:30 Plenary II: Capital Market Liberalization and the Debt Crisis Panelists: Prof. Michel Chossudovsky (University of Ottawa) Prof. Walden Bello (Focus on the Global South) Hero Vaswani (KATAPAT-Philippines) Coffee Break: 3:45-4:00 p.m. Plenary III: Status and Prospects of the Jubilee and Global Campaign against Third World Debt Panelists: John Dillon (Ecumenical Campaign for Economic Justice -Canada) Brian Ashley (Jubilee 2000 South Africa/Jubilee South) Lidy Nacpil (Freedom from Debt Coalition/Jubilee South) Synthesis and Closing Remarks: Francisco Pascual (Resource Center for People's Development) Resource Center for People's Development #24, Unit 7, Mapang-akit St, Pinyahan, QC, Philippines telefax- (632)4361831 tel - 4350815 email: rcpd@info.com.ph From amittal at foodfirst.org Wed Jan 12 03:31:51 2000 From: amittal at foodfirst.org (Anuradha Mittal) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 10:31:51 -0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1378] WTO DG faces protestors in India Message-ID: <0.700000824.1670112094-951758591-947615511@topica.com> New Delhi, Jan 11 While more than 200 activists were staging a demonstration outside, three protestors sneaked into a heavily guarded venue session of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Partnership Meet 2000, here today. WTO Director General Mike Moore had just finished speaking when an activist walked to the dias and spoke against the dangers of allowing WTO to police the world economy and also criticised the Indian industrialists for joining hands with "an evil force". Mr Mike Moore is in New Delhi on an invitation of the CII. Taking the delegates attending the conference by surprise, the three activists distributed to the delegates a copy of an open letter to the WTO Director General. Terming the WTO as a "Wicked Trade Organisation", the activists said that the recent protests on the streets at Seattle had clearly demonstrated that trade was not the answer for human development. "The protests that began in Seattle will now be seen in India," they said. A copy of the open letter to Mr Mike Moore is appended below: AN OPEN LETTER TO MR MIKE MOORE Jan 11, 2000 Mr Mike Moore Director General World Trade Organization. Dear Mr Moore, We have tolerated enough. For several years now, the people of India have been a mute witness to the systematic effort of the rich countries to recolonise the developing world under the garb of free trade. Over the years, the WTO has legitimised under TRIPs the steal, grab and plunder of biological wealth and traditional knowledge from India. Your patent laws have been designed to facilitate biopiracy from the biodiversity rich countries. We are aware that almost 90 per cent of India's estimated 45,000 plant species and 81,000 animal species are already stored illegally in the United States. To protect the economic interests of a few million farmers on either side of the Atlantic, the WTO has reached an Agreement on Agriculture, which is aimed at marginalising the 550 million Indian farmers and putting the country's food security at an unmanageable risk. For us, the survival of our small and marginal farmers, forming the backbone of the economy, is as essential as protecting the democratic traditions of this great nation. A majority of the small-scale industries in India have already closed down. The pharmaceutical sector, which made available medicines within easy reach of the people, is at the verge of closure. Multi-national companies, which your organisation essentially represents, have already embarked on the process of loot and repatriation of resources. And if the past tradition is any indication, we know that after you quit the WTO, you too will join one of these companies. Your interest in furthering the cause of these companies is, therefore, obvious. As if this is not enough, you are bringing in labour, environment and multilateral investment within the gambit of the WTO. In any case, Seattle has clearly demonstrated that you are merely a pawn in the hands of the United States. Unabashedly, you addressed joint press conferences with the US Trade Representative. You behaved as if she was your boss. You threw all the democratic norms to wind by permitting the US to hijack the global forum. The WTO is, as a placard being carried by a protestor on the streets of Seattle read: "Wicked Trade Organisation." Your agents in India, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), perpetuate the unequal doctrine on unsuspecting and gullible masses. For your kind information, many of the people you support have already sucked the national exchequer dry. For instance, the non-performing assets of the nationalised banks in India, milked dry by a few industrialists, stand at a staggering Rs 5,00,000 million !! The WTO protects the criminals. We cannot allow this to go on forever. Let this be a warning from the people of India. We will not allow a global system, which actually protects and supports the rich and the powerful at the cost of the lives of millions of poor and hungry. Mahatma Gandhi has taught us that tolerance of injustice is a crime. We will, therefore, no longer accept any sort of coercion, threat and injustice. You are perhaps aware that we have had a long history of driving out the pirates and the colonial masters. And we will do it once again, if need be. From Swadeshi Jagran Manch Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh Akhil Bhartiya Vidayarthi Prishad Bhartiya Kisan Sangh Laghu Udyog Bharati Swamajvadi Abhiyan ----------------------------------------------- Join the fight against hunger. For more information contact foodfirst@foodfirst.org. _____________________________________________________________ Keep up with breaking news! Join our Hot Topics list. http://www.topica.com/lists/breakingnews/t/12 From amittal at foodfirst.org Wed Jan 19 03:32:42 2000 From: amittal at foodfirst.org (Anuradha Mittal) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 10:32:42 -0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1379] WTO Reform? Message-ID: <0.700000824.1710136035-212058698-948220362@topica.com> Why Reform of the WTO is the Wrong Agenda By Walden Bello* In the wake of the collapse of the Seattle Ministerial, there has emerged the opinion that reform of the WTO is now the program that NGOs, governments, and citizens must embrace. The collapse of the WTO Ministerial is said to provide a unique window of opportunity for a reform agenda. Cited by some as a positive sign is United States Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky's comment, immediately after the collapse of the Seattle Ministerial, that "the WTO has outgrown the processes appropriate to an earlier time." An increasing and necessary view, generally shared among the members, was that we needed a process which had a greater degree of internal transparency and inclusion to accommodate a larger and more diverse membership." (1) Also seen as an encouraging gesture is UK Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Stephen Byers' recent statement to Commonwealth Trade Ministers in New Delhi 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." (2) These are, in our view, damage control statements and provide little indication of the seriousness about reform of the two governments that were, pre-Seattle, the stoutest defenders of the inequalities built into the structure, dynamics, and objectives of the WTO. It is unfortunate that they are now being cited to convince developing countries and NGOs to take up an agenda of reform that could lead precisely to the strengthening of an organization that is very fundamentally flawed. What civil society, North and South, should instead be doing at this point is radically cutting down the power of the institution and reducing it to simply another institution in a pluralistic world trading system with multiple systems of governance. Does World Trade Need the World Trade Organization? This is the fundamental question on which the question of reform hinges. World trade did not need the WTO to expand 17-fold between 1948 and 1997, from $124 billion to $10,772 billion.(3) This expansion took place under the flexible GATT trade regime. The WTO's founding in 1995 did not respond to a collapse or crisis of world trade such as happened in the 1930's. It was not necessary for global peace, since no world war or trade-related war had taken place during that period. In the seven major inter-state wars that took place in that period-the Korean War of 1950-53, the Vietnam War of 1945-75, the Suez Crisis of 1956, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the 1982 Falklands War, and the Gulf War of 1990-trade conflict did not figure even remotely as a cause. GATT was, in fact, functioning reasonably well as a framework for liberalizing world trade. Its dispute-settlement system was flexible and with its recognition of the "special and differential status" of developing countries, it provided the space in a global economy for Third World countries to use trade policy for development and industrialization. Why was the WTO established following the Uruguay Round of 1986-94? Of the major trading powers, Japan was very ambivalent, concerned as it was to protect its agriculture as well as its particular system of industrial production that, through formal and informal mechanisms, gave its local producers primary right to exploit the domestic market. The EU, well on the way of becoming a self-sufficient trading bloc, was likewise ambivalent, knowing that its highly subsidized system in agriculture would come under attack. Though demanding greater access to their manufactured and agricultural products in the Northern economies, the developing countries did not see this as being accomplished through a comprehensive agreement enforced by a powerful trade bureaucracy but through discrete negotiations and agreements in the model of the Integrated Program for Commodities (IPCs) and Commodity Stabilization Fund agreed upon under the aegis of UNCTAD in the late seventies. The founding of the WTO served primarily the interest of the United States. Just as it was the US which blocked the founding of the International Trade Organization (ITO) in 1948, when it felt that this would not serve its position of overwhelming economic dominance in the post-war world, so it was the US that became the dominant lobbyist for the comprehensive Uruguay Round and the founding of the WTO in late eighties and early nineties, when it felt that more competitive global conditions had created a situation where its corporate interests now demanded an opposite stance. Just as it was the US's threat in the 1950's to leave GATT if it was not allowed to maintain protective mechanisms for milk and other agricultural products that led to agricultural trade's exemption from GATT rules, so was it US pressure that brought agriculture into the GATT-WTO system in 1995. And the reason for Washington's change of mind was articulated quite candidly by then US Agriculture Secretary John Block at the start of the Uruguay Round negotiations in 1986: "[The] idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available, in most cases at much lower cost."(4) Washington, of course, did not just have developing country markets in mind, but also Japan, South Korea, and the European Union. It was the US that mainly pushed to bring services under WTO coverage, with its assessment that the in the new burgeoning area of international services, and particularly in financial services, its corporations had a lead that needed to be preserved. It was also the US that pushed to expand WTO jurisdiction to the so-called "Trade-Related Investment Measures" (TRIMs) and "Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs)." The first sought to eliminate barriers to the system of internal cross-border trade of product components among TNC (transnational corporations) subsidiaries that had been imposed by developing countries in order to develop their industries; the second to consolidate the US advantage in the cutting-edge knowledge-intensive industries. And it was the US that forced the creation of the WTO's formidable dispute-resolution and enforcement mechanism after being frustrated with what US trade officials considered weak GATT efforts to enforce rulings favorable to the US. As Washington's academic point man on trade, C. Fred Bergsten, head of the Institute of International Economics, told the US Senate, the strong WTO dispute settlement mechanism serves US interests because "we can now use the full weight of the international machinery to go after those trade barriers, reduce them, get them eliminated."(5) In sum, it has been Washington's changing perception of the needs of its economic interest-groups that have shaped and reshaped the international trading regime. It was not global necessity that gave birth to the WTO in 1995. It was the US's assessment that the interests of its corporations were no longer served by a loose and flexible GATT but needed an all-powerful and wide-ranging WTO. >From the free-market paradigm that underpins it, to the rules and regulations set forth in the different agreements that make up the Uruguay Round, to its system of decision-making and accountability, the WTO is a blueprint for the global hegemony of Corporate America. It seeks to institutionalize the accumulated advantages of US corporations. Is the WTO necessary? Yes, to the United States. But not to the rest of the world. The necessity of the WTO is one of the biggest lies of our time, and its acceptance is due to the same propaganda principle practised by Joseph Goebbels: if you repeat a lie often enough, it will be taken as truth. Can the WTO Serve the Interests of the Developing Countries? But what about the developing countries? Is the WTO a necessary structure--one that, whatever its flaws, brings more benefits than costs, and would therefore merit efforts at reform? When the Uruguay Round was being negotiated, there was considerable lack of enthusiasm for the process by the developing countries. After all, these countries had formed the backbone of UNCTAD, which, with its system of one-country/one-vote and majority voting, they felt was an international arena more congenial to their interests. They entered the Uruguay Round greatly resenting the large trading powers' policy of weakening and marginalizing UNCTAD in the late seventies and early eighties.Largely passive spectators, with a great number not even represented during the negotiations owing to resource constraints, the developing countries were dragged into unenthusiastic endorsement of the Marrakesh Accord of 1994 that sealed the Uruguay Round and established the WTO. True, there were somedeveloping countries, most of them in the Cairns Group of developed and developing country agro-exporters, that actively promoted the WTO in the hope that they would gain greater market access to their exports, but they were a small minority. To try to sell the WTO to the South, US propagandists evoked the fear that staying out of the WTO would result in a country's isolation from world trade ("like North Korea") and stoked the promise that a "rules-based system" of world trade would protect the weak countries from unilateral acts by the big trading powers. With their economies dominated by the IMF and the World Bank, with the structural adjustment programs pushed by these agencies having as a central element radical trade liberalization, much weaker as a bloc owing to the debt crisis compared to the 1970's, the height of the "New International Economic Order," most developing country delegations felt they had no choice but to sign on the dotted line. Over the next few years, however, these countries realized that they had signed away their right to employ a variety of critical trade measures for development purposes. In contrast to the loose GATT framework, which had allowed some space for development initiatives, the comprehensive and tightened Uruguay Round was fundamentally anti-development in its thrust. This is evident in the following: Loss of Trade Policy as Development Tool In signing on to GATT, Third World countries were committed to banning all quantitative restrictions on imports, reduce tariffs on many industrial imports, and promise not to raise tariffs on all other imports. In so doing, they have effectively given up the use of trade policy to pursue industrialization objectives. The way that the NICs, or "newly industrializing countries," made it to industrial status, via the policy of import substitution, is now effectively removed as a route to industrialization. The anti-industrialization thrust of the GATT-WTO Accord is made even more manifest in the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs) and the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). In their drive to industrialize, NICs like South Korea and Malaysia made use of many innovative mechanisms such as trade-balancing requirements that tied the value of a foreign investor's imports of raw materials and components to the value of his or her exports of the finished commodity, or "local content" regulations which mandated that a certain percentage of the components that went into the making of a product was sourced locally. These rules indeed restricted the maneuvering space of foreign investors, but they were successfully employed by the NICs to marry foreign investment to national industrialization. They enabled the NICs to raise income from capital-intensive exports, develop support industries, bring in technology, while still protecting local entrepreneurs' preferential access to the domestic market. In Malaysia, for instance, the strategic use of local content policy enabled the Malaysians to build a "national car," in cooperation with Mitsubishi, that has now achieved about 80 per cent local content and controls 70 per cent of the Malaysian market. Thanks to the TRIMs accord, these mechanisms used are now illegal. The Restriction of Technological Diffusion Like the TRIMs agreement, the TRIPs regime is seen as effectively opposed to the industrialization and development efforts of Third World countries. This becomes clear from a survey of the economic history not only of the NICs but of almost all late-industrializing countries. A key factor in their industrial take-off was their relatively easy access to cutting-edge technology: The US industrialized, to a great extent by using but paying very little for British manufacturing innovations, as did the Germans. Japan industrialized by liberally borrowing US technological innovations, but barely compensating the Americans for this. And the Koreans industrialized by copying quite liberally and with little payment US and Japanese product and process technologies. But what is "technological diffusion" from the perspective of the late industrializer is "piracy" from that of the industrial leader. The TRIPs regime takes the side of the latter and makes the process of industrialization by imitation much more difficult from hereon. It represents what UNCTAD describes as "a premature strengthening of the intellectual property system...that favors monopolistically controlled innovation over broad-based diffusion."(6) The TRIPs regime provides a generalized minimum patent protection of 20 years; increases the duration of the protection for semi-conductors or computer chips; institutes draconian border regulations against products judged to be violating intellectual property rights; and places the burden of proof on the presumed violator of process patents. The TRIPs accord is a victory for the US high-tech industry, which has long been lobbying for stronger controls over the diffusion of innovations. Innovation in the knowledge-intensive high-tech sector- in electronic software and hardware, biotechnology, lasers, opto- electronics, liquid crystal technology, to name a few-has become the central determinant of economic power in our time. And when any company in the NICs and Third World wishes to innovate, say in chip design, software programming, or computer assembly, it necessarily has to integrate several patented designs and processes, most of them from US electronic hardware and software giants like Microsoft, Intel, and Texas Instruments.(7) As the Koreans have bitterly learned, exorbitant multiple royalty payments to what has been called the American "high tech mafia" keeps one's profit margins very low while reducing incentives for local innovation. The likely outcome is for a Southern manufacturer simply to pay royalties for a technology rather than to innovate, thus perpetuating the technological dependence on Northern firms.Thus, TRIPs enables the technological leader, in this case the United States, to greatly influence the pace of technological and industrial development in rival industrialized countries, the NICs, and the Third World. Watering Down the "Special and Differential Treatment" Principle The central principle of UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development)--an organization disempowered by the establishment of the WTO--is that owing to the critical nexus between trade and development, developing countries must not be subjected to the same expectations, rules, and regulations that govern trade among the developed countries. Owing to historical and structural considerations, developing countries need special consideration and special assistance in leveling the playing field for them to be able to participate equitably in world trade. This would include both the use of protective tariffs for development purposes and preferential access of developing country exports to developed country markets. While GATT was not centrally concerned with development, it did recognize the "special and differential status" of the developing countries. Perhaps the strongest statement of this was in the Tokyo Round Declaration in 1973, which recognized "the importance of the application of differential measures in developing countries in ways which will provide special and more favourable treatment for them in areas of negotiation where this is feasible."(8) Different sections of the evolving GATT code allowed countries to renegotiate tariff bindings in order to promote the establishment of certain industries; allowed developing countries to use tariffs for economic development and fiscal purposes; allowed them to use quantitative restrictions to promote infant industries; and conceded the principle of non-reciprocity by developing countries in trade negotiation.(9) The 1979 Framework Agreement known at the Enabling Clause also provided a permanent legal basis for General System of Preferences (GSP) schemes that would provide preferential access to developing country exports.(10) A significant shift occurred in the Uruguay Round. GSP schemes were not bound, meaning tariffs could be raised against developing country until they equaled the bound rates applied to imports for all sources. Indeed, during the negotiations, the threat to remove GSP was used as "a form of bilateral pressure on developing countries."(11) SDT was turned from a focus on a special right to protect and special rights of market access to "one of responding to special adjustment difficulties in developing countries stemming from the implementation of WTO decisions."(12) Measures meant to address the structural inequality of the trading system gave way to measures, such as a lower rate of tariff reduction or a longer time frame for implementing decisions, which regarded the problem of developing countries as simply that of catching up in an essentially even playing field. STD has been watered down in the WTO, and this is not surprising for the neoliberal agenda that underpins the WTO philosophy differs from the Keynesian assumptions of GATT: that there are no special rights, no special protections needed for development. The only route to development is one that involves radical trade (and investment) liberalization. Fate of the Special Measures for Developing Countries Perhaps the best indicators of the marginal consideration given to developing countries in the WTO is the fate of the measures that were supposed to respond to the special conditions of developing countries. There were three key agreements which promoters of the WTO claimed were specifically designed to meet the needs of the South: * The Special Ministerial Agreement approved in Marrakesh in April 1994, which decreed that special compensatory measures would be taken to counteract the negative effects of trade liberalization on the net food-importing developing countries; * The Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, which mandated thart the system of quotas on developing country exports of textiles and garments to the North would be dismantled over ten years; * The Agreement on Agriculture, which, while "imperfect," nevertheless was said to promise greater market access to developing country agricultural products and begin the process of bringing down the high levels of state support and subsidization of EU and US agriculture, which was resulting in the dumping of massive quantities of grain on Third World markets. What happened to these measures? The Special Ministerial Decision taken at Marrakesh to provide assistance to "Net Food Importing Countries" to offset the reduction of subsidies that would make food imports more expensive for the "Net Food Importing Countries" has never been implemented. Though world crude prices more than doubled in 1995/96, the World Bank and the IMF scotched an idea of any offsetting aid by arguing that "the price increase was not due to the Agreement on Agriculture, and besides there was never any agreement anyway on who would be responsible for providing the assistance."(13) The Agreement on Textiles and Clothing committed the developed countries to bring under WTO discipline all textile and garment imports over four stages, ending on January 1, 2005. A key feature was supposed to be the lifting of quotas on imports restricted under the Multifiber Agreement (MFA) and similar schemes which had been used to contain penetration of developed country markets by cheap clothing and textile imports from the Third World. Developed countries retained, however, the right to choose which product lines to liberalize when, so that they first brought mainly unrestricted products into the WTO discipline and postponed dealing with restricted products till much later. Thus, in the first phase, all restricted products continued to be under quota, as only items where imports were not considering threatening-like felt hats or yarn of carded fine animal hair--were included in the developed countries' notifications. Indeed, the notifications for the coverage of products for liberalization on January 1, 1998 showed that "even at the second stage of implementation only a very small proportion" of restricted products would see their quotas lifted.(14) Given this trend, John Whalley notes that "the belief is now widely held in the developing workd that in 2004, whilme the MFA may disappear, it may well be replaced by a series of other trade instruments, possibly substantial increases in anti-dumping duties." (15) When it comes to the Agreement on Agriculture, which was sold to developing countries during the Uruguay Round as a major step toward providing market access to developing country imports and bringing down the high levels of domestic support for first world farming interests that results in dumping of commodities in third world markets, little gains in market access after five years into developed country markets have been accompanied by even higher levels of overall subsidization-through ingenious combinations of export subsidies, export credits, market support, and various kinds of direct income payments. The figures speak for themselves: the level of overall subsidization of agriculture in the OECD countries rose from $182 billion in 1995 when the WTO was born to $280 billion in 1997 to $362 billion in 1998! Instead of the beginning of a New Deal, the AOA, in the words of a former Philippine Secretary of Trade, "has perpetuated the unevenness of a playing field which the multilateral trading system has been trying to correct. Moreover, this has placed the burden of adjustment on developing countries relative to countries who can afford to maintain high levels of domestic support and export subsidies."(16) The collapse of the agricultural negotiations in Seattle is the best example of how extremely difficult it is to reform the AOA. The European Union opposed till the bitter end language in an agreement that would commit it to "significant reduction" of its subsidies. But the US was not blameless. It resolutely opposed any effort to cut back on its forms of subsidies such as export credits, direct income for farmers, and "emergency" farm aid, as well as any mention of its practice of dumping products in developing country markets. Oligarchic Decision-Making as a Central, Defining Process Is the system of WTO decisionmaking reformable? While far more flexible than the WTO, the GATT was, of course, far from perfect, and one of the bad traits that the WTO took over from it was the system of decision-making. GATT functioned through a process called "consensus." Now consensus responded to the same problem that faced the IMF and the World Bank's developed country members: how to assure control at a time that the numbers gave the edge to the new countries of the South. In the Fund and the Bank, the system of decision-making evolved had the weight of a country's vote determined by the size of its capital subscriptions, which gave the US and the other rich countries effective control of the two organizations. In the GATT, a one-country one-vote system was initially tried, but the big trading powers saw this as inimical to their interests. Thus, the last time a vote was taken in GATT was in 1959.(17) The system that finally emerged was described by US economist Bergsten as one that "does not work by voting. It works by a consensus arrangement which, to tell the truth, is managed by four- the Quads: the United States, Japan, European Union, and Canada."(18) He continued: "Those countries have to agree if any major steps are going to be made, that is true. But no votes.(19) Indeed, so undemocratic is the WTO that decisions are arrived at informally, via caucuses convoked in the corridors of the ministerials by the big trading powers. The formal plenary sessions, which in democracies are the central arena for decision- making, are reserved for speeches. The key agreements to come out of the first and second ministerials of the WTO-the decision to liberalize information technology trade taken at the first ministerial in Singapore in 1996 and the agreement to liberalize trade in electronic commerce arrived at in Geneva in 1998-were all decided in informal backroom sessions and simply presented to the full assembly as faits accompli. Consensus simply functioned to render non-transparent a process where smaller, weaker countries were pressured, browbeaten, or bullied to conform to the "consensus" forged among major trading powers. With surprising frankness, at a press conference in Seattle, US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, who played the pivotal role in all three ministerials, described the dynamics and consequences of this system of decision-making: The process, including even at Singapore as recently as three years ago, was a rather exclusionary one. All meetings were held between 20 and 30 keycountries...And that meant 100 countries, 100, were never in the room...[T]his led to an extraordinarily bad feeling that they were left our of the process and that the results even at Singapore had been dictated to them by the 25 or 30 privileged countries who were in the room.(20) Then, after registering her frustration at the WTO delegates' failing to arrive at consensus via supposedly broader "working groups" set up for the Seattle ministerial, Barshefsky warned delegates: "...[I] have made very clear and I reiterated to all ministers today that, if we are unable to achieve that goal, I fully reserve the right to also use a more exclusive process to achieve a final outcome. There is no question about either my right as the chair to do it or my intention as the chair to do it...."(21) And she was serious about ramming through a declaration at the expense of non-representativeness, with India, one of the key developing country members of the WTO, being "routinely excluded from private talks organized by the United States in last ditch efforts to come up with a face-saving deal."(22) In damage-containment mode after the collapse of the Seattle Ministerial, Barshefsky, WTO Director General Mike Moore, and other rich country representatives have spoken about the need for WTO "reform." But none have declared any intention of pushing for a one-county/one-vote majority decision-making system or a voting system weighted by population size, which would be the only fair and legitimate methods in a democratic international organization. The fact is, such mechanisms will never be adopted, for this would put the developing countries in a preponderant role in terms of decision-making. Should One Try to Reform a Jurassic Institution? Reform is a viable strategy when the system is question is fundamentally fair but has simply been corrupted such as the case with some democracies. It is not a viable strategy when a system is so fundamentally unequal in purposes, principles, and processes as the WTO. The WTO systematically protects and the trade and economic advantages of the rich countries, particularly the United States. It is based on a paradigm or philosophy that denigrates the right to take actvist measures to achieve development on the part of less developed countries, thus leading to a radical dilution of their right to "special and differntial treatment." The WTO raises inequality into a principle of decisionmaking. The WTO is often promoted as a "rules-based" trading framework that protects the weaker and poorer countries from unilateral actions by the stronger states. The opposite is true: the WTO, like many other multilateral international agreements, is meant to instututionalize and legtimize inequality. Its main purpose is to reduce the tremendous policing costs to the stronger powers that would be involved in disciplining many small countries in a more fluid, less structured international system. It is not surprising that both the WTO and the IMF are currently mired in a severe crisis of legitimacy. For both are highly centralized, highly unaccountable, highly non-transparent global institutions that seek to subjugate, control, or harness vast swathes of global economic, social, political, and environmental processes to the needs and interests of a global minority of states, elites, and TNCs. The dynamics of such institutions clash with the burgeoning democratic aspirations of peoples, countries, and communities in both the North and the South. The centralizing dynamics of these institutions clash with the efforts of communities and nations to regain control of their fate and achieve a modicum of security by deconcentrating and decentralizing economic and political power. In other words, these are Jurassic institutions in an age of participatory political and economic democracy. Building a More Pluralistic System of International Trade Governance If there is one thing that is clear, it is that developing country governments and international civil society must not allow their energies to be hijacked into reforming these institutions. This will only amount to administering a facelift to fundamentally flawed institutions. Indeed, today's need is not another centralized global institution, reformed or unreformed, but the deconcentration and decentralization of institutional power and the creation of a pluralistic system of institutions and organizations interacting with one another amidst broadly defined and flexible agreements and understandings. It was under such a more pluralistic global system, where hegemonic power was still far form institutionalized in a set of all encompassing and powerful multilateral organizations that the Latin American countries and many Asian countries were able to achieve a modicum of industrial development in the period from 1950-70. It was under a more pluralistic world system, under a GATT that was limited in its power, flexible, and more sympathetic to the special status of developing countries, that the East and Southeast Asian countries were able to become newly industrializing countries through activist state trade and industrial policies that departed significantly from the free-market biases enshrined in the WTO. The alternative to a powerful WTO is not a Hobbesian state of nature. It is always the powerful that have stoked this fear. The reality of international economic relations in a world marked by a multiplicity of international and regional institutions that check one another is a far cry from the propaganda image of a "nasty" and "brutish" world. Of course, the threat of unilateral action by the powerful is ever present in such a system, but it is one that even the powerful hesitate to take for fear of its consequences on their legitimacy as well as the reaction it would provoke in the form of opposing coalitions. In other words, what developing countries and international civil society should aim at is not to reform the WTO but, through a combination of passive and active measures, to radically reduce its power and to make it simply another international insitution coexisting with and being checked by other international organizations, agreements, and regional groupings. These would include such diverse actors and institutions as UNCTAD, multilateral environmental agreements, the International Labor Organization (ILO), evolving trde blocs such as Mercosur in Latin America, SAARC in South Asia, SADCC in Southern Africa, and ASEAN in Southeast Asia. It is in such a more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world with multiple checks and balances that the nations and communities of the South will be able to carve out the space to develop based on their values, their rhythms, and the strategies of their choice. *Walden Bello, PhD, is executive director of Focus on the Global South and professor of sociology and public administratioon at the University of the Philippines. He attended all three WTO Ministerials as an NGO delegate. He is the author of several works on the WTO including Iron Cage: The WTO, the Bretton Woods Institutions, and the Third World (Bangkok: Focus on the Global South, 1999). 1. Press briefing, Seattle, 2 December 1999. 2. Quoted in "Deadline Set for WTO Reforms," Guardian News Service, Jan. 10, 2000. 3. Figures from World Trade Organization, Annual Report 1998: International Trade Statistics (Geneva: WTO, 1998), p. 12. 4. Quoted in "Cakes and Caviar: The Dunkel Draft and Third World Agriculture," Ecologist, Vol. 23, No. 6 (Nov-Dec. 1993), p. 220. 5. C. Fred Bergsten, Director, Institute for International Economics, Testimony before US Senate, Washington, DC, Oct. 13, 1994. 6. UNCTAD, Trade and Development Report 1991 (New York: United Nations, 1991), p. 191. 7. See discussion of this in Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1990), p. 161. 8. Quoted in John Whaley, "Special and Differential Treatment in the Millenium Round," CSGR Working Paper, No. 30/99 (May 1999), p 3. 9. Ibid., p. 4. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. Ibid., p. 10. 12. Ibid., p. 14. 13. "More Power to the World Trade Organization?", Panos Briefing, Nov. 1999, p. 14. 14. South Center, The Multilateral Trade Agenda and the South (Geneva: South Center, 1998), p. 32. 15. John Whalley, Building Poor Countries' Trading Capacity CSGR Working Paper Series (Warwick: CSGR, March 1999) 16. Secretary of Trade Cesar Bautista, Address to 2nd WTO Ministerial, Geneva, May 18, 1998. 17. C. Fred Bergsten, Director, Institute for International Economics, Terstimony before the US Senate, Washington, DC, Oct. 13, 1994. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Press briefing, Seattle, Washington, Dec. 2, 1999 21. Ibid. 22. "Deadline Set for WTO Reforms," Guardian News Service, Jan. 10, 2000 ****************************************************************************** Focus on the Global South (FOCUS) c/o CUSRI, Chulalongkorn University Bangkok 10330 THAILAND Tel: 662 218 7363/7364/7365/7383 Fax: 662 255 9976 E-mail: N.Bullard@focusweb.org Web Page http://www.focusweb.org Join the fight against hunger. For more information contact foodfirst@foodfirst.org. _____________________________________________________________ Check out the new and improved Topica site! http://www.topica.com/t/13 From amittal at foodfirst.org Wed Jan 19 03:32:43 2000 From: amittal at foodfirst.org (Anuradha Mittal) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 10:32:43 -0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1380] WTO Reform? Message-ID: <0.700000824.1572125406-212058698-948220363@topica.com> Why Reform of the WTO is the Wrong Agenda By Walden Bello* In the wake of the collapse of the Seattle Ministerial, there has emerged the opinion that reform of the WTO is now the program that NGOs, governments, and citizens must embrace. The collapse of the WTO Ministerial is said to provide a unique window of opportunity for a reform agenda. Cited by some as a positive sign is United States Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky's comment, immediately after the collapse of the Seattle Ministerial, that "the WTO has outgrown the processes appropriate to an earlier time." An increasing and necessary view, generally shared among the members, was that we needed a process which had a greater degree of internal transparency and inclusion to accommodate a larger and more diverse membership." (1) Also seen as an encouraging gesture is UK Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Stephen Byers' recent statement to Commonwealth Trade Ministers in New Delhi 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." (2) These are, in our view, damage control statements and provide little indication of the seriousness about reform of the two governments that were, pre-Seattle, the stoutest defenders of the inequalities built into the structure, dynamics, and objectives of the WTO. It is unfortunate that they are now being cited to convince developing countries and NGOs to take up an agenda of reform that could lead precisely to the strengthening of an organization that is very fundamentally flawed. What civil society, North and South, should instead be doing at this point is radically cutting down the power of the institution and reducing it to simply another institution in a pluralistic world trading system with multiple systems of governance. Does World Trade Need the World Trade Organization? This is the fundamental question on which the question of reform hinges. World trade did not need the WTO to expand 17-fold between 1948 and 1997, from $124 billion to $10,772 billion.(3) This expansion took place under the flexible GATT trade regime. The WTO's founding in 1995 did not respond to a collapse or crisis of world trade such as happened in the 1930's. It was not necessary for global peace, since no world war or trade-related war had taken place during that period. In the seven major inter-state wars that took place in that period-the Korean War of 1950-53, the Vietnam War of 1945-75, the Suez Crisis of 1956, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the 1982 Falklands War, and the Gulf War of 1990-trade conflict did not figure even remotely as a cause. GATT was, in fact, functioning reasonably well as a framework for liberalizing world trade. Its dispute-settlement system was flexible and with its recognition of the "special and differential status" of developing countries, it provided the space in a global economy for Third World countries to use trade policy for development and industrialization. Why was the WTO established following the Uruguay Round of 1986-94? Of the major trading powers, Japan was very ambivalent, concerned as it was to protect its agriculture as well as its particular system of industrial production that, through formal and informal mechanisms, gave its local producers primary right to exploit the domestic market. The EU, well on the way of becoming a self-sufficient trading bloc, was likewise ambivalent, knowing that its highly subsidized system in agriculture would come under attack. Though demanding greater access to their manufactured and agricultural products in the Northern economies, the developing countries did not see this as being accomplished through a comprehensive agreement enforced by a powerful trade bureaucracy but through discrete negotiations and agreements in the model of the Integrated Program for Commodities (IPCs) and Commodity Stabilization Fund agreed upon under the aegis of UNCTAD in the late seventies. The founding of the WTO served primarily the interest of the United States. Just as it was the US which blocked the founding of the International Trade Organization (ITO) in 1948, when it felt that this would not serve its position of overwhelming economic dominance in the post-war world, so it was the US that became the dominant lobbyist for the comprehensive Uruguay Round and the founding of the WTO in late eighties and early nineties, when it felt that more competitive global conditions had created a situation where its corporate interests now demanded an opposite stance. Just as it was the US's threat in the 1950's to leave GATT if it was not allowed to maintain protective mechanisms for milk and other agricultural products that led to agricultural trade's exemption from GATT rules, so was it US pressure that brought agriculture into the GATT-WTO system in 1995. And the reason for Washington's change of mind was articulated quite candidly by then US Agriculture Secretary John Block at the start of the Uruguay Round negotiations in 1986: "[The] idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available, in most cases at much lower cost."(4) Washington, of course, did not just have developing country markets in mind, but also Japan, South Korea, and the European Union. It was the US that mainly pushed to bring services under WTO coverage, with its assessment that the in the new burgeoning area of international services, and particularly in financial services, its corporations had a lead that needed to be preserved. It was also the US that pushed to expand WTO jurisdiction to the so-called "Trade-Related Investment Measures" (TRIMs) and "Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs)." The first sought to eliminate barriers to the system of internal cross-border trade of product components among TNC (transnational corporations) subsidiaries that had been imposed by developing countries in order to develop their industries; the second to consolidate the US advantage in the cutting-edge knowledge-intensive industries. And it was the US that forced the creation of the WTO's formidable dispute-resolution and enforcement mechanism after being frustrated with what US trade officials considered weak GATT efforts to enforce rulings favorable to the US. As Washington's academic point man on trade, C. Fred Bergsten, head of the Institute of International Economics, told the US Senate, the strong WTO dispute settlement mechanism serves US interests because "we can now use the full weight of the international machinery to go after those trade barriers, reduce them, get them eliminated."(5) In sum, it has been Washington's changing perception of the needs of its economic interest-groups that have shaped and reshaped the international trading regime. It was not global necessity that gave birth to the WTO in 1995. It was the US's assessment that the interests of its corporations were no longer served by a loose and flexible GATT but needed an all-powerful and wide-ranging WTO. >From the free-market paradigm that underpins it, to the rules and regulations set forth in the different agreements that make up the Uruguay Round, to its system of decision-making and accountability, the WTO is a blueprint for the global hegemony of Corporate America. It seeks to institutionalize the accumulated advantages of US corporations. Is the WTO necessary? Yes, to the United States. But not to the rest of the world. The necessity of the WTO is one of the biggest lies of our time, and its acceptance is due to the same propaganda principle practised by Joseph Goebbels: if you repeat a lie often enough, it will be taken as truth. Can the WTO Serve the Interests of the Developing Countries? But what about the developing countries? Is the WTO a necessary structure--one that, whatever its flaws, brings more benefits than costs, and would therefore merit efforts at reform? When the Uruguay Round was being negotiated, there was considerable lack of enthusiasm for the process by the developing countries. After all, these countries had formed the backbone of UNCTAD, which, with its system of one-country/one-vote and majority voting, they felt was an international arena more congenial to their interests. They entered the Uruguay Round greatly resenting the large trading powers' policy of weakening and marginalizing UNCTAD in the late seventies and early eighties.Largely passive spectators, with a great number not even represented during the negotiations owing to resource constraints, the developing countries were dragged into unenthusiastic endorsement of the Marrakesh Accord of 1994 that sealed the Uruguay Round and established the WTO. True, there were somedeveloping countries, most of them in the Cairns Group of developed and developing country agro-exporters, that actively promoted the WTO in the hope that they would gain greater market access to their exports, but they were a small minority. To try to sell the WTO to the South, US propagandists evoked the fear that staying out of the WTO would result in a country's isolation from world trade ("like North Korea") and stoked the promise that a "rules-based system" of world trade would protect the weak countries from unilateral acts by the big trading powers. With their economies dominated by the IMF and the World Bank, with the structural adjustment programs pushed by these agencies having as a central element radical trade liberalization, much weaker as a bloc owing to the debt crisis compared to the 1970's, the height of the "New International Economic Order," most developing country delegations felt they had no choice but to sign on the dotted line. Over the next few years, however, these countries realized that they had signed away their right to employ a variety of critical trade measures for development purposes. In contrast to the loose GATT framework, which had allowed some space for development initiatives, the comprehensive and tightened Uruguay Round was fundamentally anti-development in its thrust. This is evident in the following: Loss of Trade Policy as Development Tool In signing on to GATT, Third World countries were committed to banning all quantitative restrictions on imports, reduce tariffs on many industrial imports, and promise not to raise tariffs on all other imports. In so doing, they have effectively given up the use of trade policy to pursue industrialization objectives. The way that the NICs, or "newly industrializing countries," made it to industrial status, via the policy of import substitution, is now effectively removed as a route to industrialization. The anti-industrialization thrust of the GATT-WTO Accord is made even more manifest in the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs) and the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). In their drive to industrialize, NICs like South Korea and Malaysia made use of many innovative mechanisms such as trade-balancing requirements that tied the value of a foreign investor's imports of raw materials and components to the value of his or her exports of the finished commodity, or "local content" regulations which mandated that a certain percentage of the components that went into the making of a product was sourced locally. These rules indeed restricted the maneuvering space of foreign investors, but they were successfully employed by the NICs to marry foreign investment to national industrialization. They enabled the NICs to raise income from capital-intensive exports, develop support industries, bring in technology, while still protecting local entrepreneurs' preferential access to the domestic market. In Malaysia, for instance, the strategic use of local content policy enabled the Malaysians to build a "national car," in cooperation with Mitsubishi, that has now achieved about 80 per cent local content and controls 70 per cent of the Malaysian market. Thanks to the TRIMs accord, these mechanisms used are now illegal. The Restriction of Technological Diffusion Like the TRIMs agreement, the TRIPs regime is seen as effectively opposed to the industrialization and development efforts of Third World countries. This becomes clear from a survey of the economic history not only of the NICs but of almost all late-industrializing countries. A key factor in their industrial take-off was their relatively easy access to cutting-edge technology: The US industrialized, to a great extent by using but paying very little for British manufacturing innovations, as did the Germans. Japan industrialized by liberally borrowing US technological innovations, but barely compensating the Americans for this. And the Koreans industrialized by copying quite liberally and with little payment US and Japanese product and process technologies. But what is "technological diffusion" from the perspective of the late industrializer is "piracy" from that of the industrial leader. The TRIPs regime takes the side of the latter and makes the process of industrialization by imitation much more difficult from hereon. It represents what UNCTAD describes as "a premature strengthening of the intellectual property system...that favors monopolistically controlled innovation over broad-based diffusion."(6) The TRIPs regime provides a generalized minimum patent protection of 20 years; increases the duration of the protection for semi-conductors or computer chips; institutes draconian border regulations against products judged to be violating intellectual property rights; and places the burden of proof on the presumed violator of process patents. The TRIPs accord is a victory for the US high-tech industry, which has long been lobbying for stronger controls over the diffusion of innovations. Innovation in the knowledge-intensive high-tech sector- in electronic software and hardware, biotechnology, lasers, opto- electronics, liquid crystal technology, to name a few-has become the central determinant of economic power in our time. And when any company in the NICs and Third World wishes to innovate, say in chip design, software programming, or computer assembly, it necessarily has to integrate several patented designs and processes, most of them from US electronic hardware and software giants like Microsoft, Intel, and Texas Instruments.(7) As the Koreans have bitterly learned, exorbitant multiple royalty payments to what has been called the American "high tech mafia" keeps one's profit margins very low while reducing incentives for local innovation. The likely outcome is for a Southern manufacturer simply to pay royalties for a technology rather than to innovate, thus perpetuating the technological dependence on Northern firms.Thus, TRIPs enables the technological leader, in this case the United States, to greatly influence the pace of technological and industrial development in rival industrialized countries, the NICs, and the Third World. Watering Down the "Special and Differential Treatment" Principle The central principle of UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development)--an organization disempowered by the establishment of the WTO--is that owing to the critical nexus between trade and development, developing countries must not be subjected to the same expectations, rules, and regulations that govern trade among the developed countries. Owing to historical and structural considerations, developing countries need special consideration and special assistance in leveling the playing field for them to be able to participate equitably in world trade. This would include both the use of protective tariffs for development purposes and preferential access of developing country exports to developed country markets. While GATT was not centrally concerned with development, it did recognize the "special and differential status" of the developing countries. Perhaps the strongest statement of this was in the Tokyo Round Declaration in 1973, which recognized "the importance of the application of differential measures in developing countries in ways which will provide special and more favourable treatment for them in areas of negotiation where this is feasible."(8) Different sections of the evolving GATT code allowed countries to renegotiate tariff bindings in order to promote the establishment of certain industries; allowed developing countries to use tariffs for economic development and fiscal purposes; allowed them to use quantitative restrictions to promote infant industries; and conceded the principle of non-reciprocity by developing countries in trade negotiation.(9) The 1979 Framework Agreement known at the Enabling Clause also provided a permanent legal basis for General System of Preferences (GSP) schemes that would provide preferential access to developing country exports.(10) A significant shift occurred in the Uruguay Round. GSP schemes were not bound, meaning tariffs could be raised against developing country until they equaled the bound rates applied to imports for all sources. Indeed, during the negotiations, the threat to remove GSP was used as "a form of bilateral pressure on developing countries."(11) SDT was turned from a focus on a special right to protect and special rights of market access to "one of responding to special adjustment difficulties in developing countries stemming from the implementation of WTO decisions."(12) Measures meant to address the structural inequality of the trading system gave way to measures, such as a lower rate of tariff reduction or a longer time frame for implementing decisions, which regarded the problem of developing countries as simply that of catching up in an essentially even playing field. STD has been watered down in the WTO, and this is not surprising for the neoliberal agenda that underpins the WTO philosophy differs from the Keynesian assumptions of GATT: that there are no special rights, no special protections needed for development. The only route to development is one that involves radical trade (and investment) liberalization. Fate of the Special Measures for Developing Countries Perhaps the best indicators of the marginal consideration given to developing countries in the WTO is the fate of the measures that were supposed to respond to the special conditions of developing countries. There were three key agreements which promoters of the WTO claimed were specifically designed to meet the needs of the South: * The Special Ministerial Agreement approved in Marrakesh in April 1994, which decreed that special compensatory measures would be taken to counteract the negative effects of trade liberalization on the net food-importing developing countries; * The Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, which mandated thart the system of quotas on developing country exports of textiles and garments to the North would be dismantled over ten years; * The Agreement on Agriculture, which, while "imperfect," nevertheless was said to promise greater market access to developing country agricultural products and begin the process of bringing down the high levels of state support and subsidization of EU and US agriculture, which was resulting in the dumping of massive quantities of grain on Third World markets. What happened to these measures? The Special Ministerial Decision taken at Marrakesh to provide assistance to "Net Food Importing Countries" to offset the reduction of subsidies that would make food imports more expensive for the "Net Food Importing Countries" has never been implemented. Though world crude prices more than doubled in 1995/96, the World Bank and the IMF scotched an idea of any offsetting aid by arguing that "the price increase was not due to the Agreement on Agriculture, and besides there was never any agreement anyway on who would be responsible for providing the assistance."(13) The Agreement on Textiles and Clothing committed the developed countries to bring under WTO discipline all textile and garment imports over four stages, ending on January 1, 2005. A key feature was supposed to be the lifting of quotas on imports restricted under the Multifiber Agreement (MFA) and similar schemes which had been used to contain penetration of developed country markets by cheap clothing and textile imports from the Third World. Developed countries retained, however, the right to choose which product lines to liberalize when, so that they first brought mainly unrestricted products into the WTO discipline and postponed dealing with restricted products till much later. Thus, in the first phase, all restricted products continued to be under quota, as only items where imports were not considering threatening-like felt hats or yarn of carded fine animal hair--were included in the developed countries' notifications. Indeed, the notifications for the coverage of products for liberalization on January 1, 1998 showed that "even at the second stage of implementation only a very small proportion" of restricted products would see their quotas lifted.(14) Given this trend, John Whalley notes that "the belief is now widely held in the developing workd that in 2004, whilme the MFA may disappear, it may well be replaced by a series of other trade instruments, possibly substantial increases in anti-dumping duties." (15) When it comes to the Agreement on Agriculture, which was sold to developing countries during the Uruguay Round as a major step toward providing market access to developing country imports and bringing down the high levels of domestic support for first world farming interests that results in dumping of commodities in third world markets, little gains in market access after five years into developed country markets have been accompanied by even higher levels of overall subsidization-through ingenious combinations of export subsidies, export credits, market support, and various kinds of direct income payments. The figures speak for themselves: the level of overall subsidization of agriculture in the OECD countries rose from $182 billion in 1995 when the WTO was born to $280 billion in 1997 to $362 billion in 1998! Instead of the beginning of a New Deal, the AOA, in the words of a former Philippine Secretary of Trade, "has perpetuated the unevenness of a playing field which the multilateral trading system has been trying to correct. Moreover, this has placed the burden of adjustment on developing countries relative to countries who can afford to maintain high levels of domestic support and export subsidies."(16) The collapse of the agricultural negotiations in Seattle is the best example of how extremely difficult it is to reform the AOA. The European Union opposed till the bitter end language in an agreement that would commit it to "significant reduction" of its subsidies. But the US was not blameless. It resolutely opposed any effort to cut back on its forms of subsidies such as export credits, direct income for farmers, and "emergency" farm aid, as well as any mention of its practice of dumping products in developing country markets. Oligarchic Decision-Making as a Central, Defining Process Is the system of WTO decisionmaking reformable? While far more flexible than the WTO, the GATT was, of course, far from perfect, and one of the bad traits that the WTO took over from it was the system of decision-making. GATT functioned through a process called "consensus." Now consensus responded to the same problem that faced the IMF and the World Bank's developed country members: how to assure control at a time that the numbers gave the edge to the new countries of the South. In the Fund and the Bank, the system of decision-making evolved had the weight of a country's vote determined by the size of its capital subscriptions, which gave the US and the other rich countries effective control of the two organizations. In the GATT, a one-country one-vote system was initially tried, but the big trading powers saw this as inimical to their interests. Thus, the last time a vote was taken in GATT was in 1959.(17) The system that finally emerged was described by US economist Bergsten as one that "does not work by voting. It works by a consensus arrangement which, to tell the truth, is managed by four- the Quads: the United States, Japan, European Union, and Canada."(18) He continued: "Those countries have to agree if any major steps are going to be made, that is true. But no votes.(19) Indeed, so undemocratic is the WTO that decisions are arrived at informally, via caucuses convoked in the corridors of the ministerials by the big trading powers. The formal plenary sessions, which in democracies are the central arena for decision- making, are reserved for speeches. The key agreements to come out of the first and second ministerials of the WTO-the decision to liberalize information technology trade taken at the first ministerial in Singapore in 1996 and the agreement to liberalize trade in electronic commerce arrived at in Geneva in 1998-were all decided in informal backroom sessions and simply presented to the full assembly as faits accompli. Consensus simply functioned to render non-transparent a process where smaller, weaker countries were pressured, browbeaten, or bullied to conform to the "consensus" forged among major trading powers. With surprising frankness, at a press conference in Seattle, US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, who played the pivotal role in all three ministerials, described the dynamics and consequences of this system of decision-making: The process, including even at Singapore as recently as three years ago, was a rather exclusionary one. All meetings were held between 20 and 30 keycountries...And that meant 100 countries, 100, were never in the room...[T]his led to an extraordinarily bad feeling that they were left our of the process and that the results even at Singapore had been dictated to them by the 25 or 30 privileged countries who were in the room.(20) Then, after registering her frustration at the WTO delegates' failing to arrive at consensus via supposedly broader "working groups" set up for the Seattle ministerial, Barshefsky warned delegates: "...[I] have made very clear and I reiterated to all ministers today that, if we are unable to achieve that goal, I fully reserve the right to also use a more exclusive process to achieve a final outcome. There is no question about either my right as the chair to do it or my intention as the chair to do it...."(21) And she was serious about ramming through a declaration at the expense of non-representativeness, with India, one of the key developing country members of the WTO, being "routinely excluded from private talks organized by the United States in last ditch efforts to come up with a face-saving deal."(22) In damage-containment mode after the collapse of the Seattle Ministerial, Barshefsky, WTO Director General Mike Moore, and other rich country representatives have spoken about the need for WTO "reform." But none have declared any intention of pushing for a one-county/one-vote majority decision-making system or a voting system weighted by population size, which would be the only fair and legitimate methods in a democratic international organization. The fact is, such mechanisms will never be adopted, for this would put the developing countries in a preponderant role in terms of decision-making. Should One Try to Reform a Jurassic Institution? Reform is a viable strategy when the system is question is fundamentally fair but has simply been corrupted such as the case with some democracies. It is not a viable strategy when a system is so fundamentally unequal in purposes, principles, and processes as the WTO. The WTO systematically protects and the trade and economic advantages of the rich countries, particularly the United States. It is based on a paradigm or philosophy that denigrates the right to take actvist measures to achieve development on the part of less developed countries, thus leading to a radical dilution of their right to "special and differntial treatment." The WTO raises inequality into a principle of decisionmaking. The WTO is often promoted as a "rules-based" trading framework that protects the weaker and poorer countries from unilateral actions by the stronger states. The opposite is true: the WTO, like many other multilateral international agreements, is meant to instututionalize and legtimize inequality. Its main purpose is to reduce the tremendous policing costs to the stronger powers that would be involved in disciplining many small countries in a more fluid, less structured international system. It is not surprising that both the WTO and the IMF are currently mired in a severe crisis of legitimacy. For both are highly centralized, highly unaccountable, highly non-transparent global institutions that seek to subjugate, control, or harness vast swathes of global economic, social, political, and environmental processes to the needs and interests of a global minority of states, elites, and TNCs. The dynamics of such institutions clash with the burgeoning democratic aspirations of peoples, countries, and communities in both the North and the South. The centralizing dynamics of these institutions clash with the efforts of communities and nations to regain control of their fate and achieve a modicum of security by deconcentrating and decentralizing economic and political power. In other words, these are Jurassic institutions in an age of participatory political and economic democracy. Building a More Pluralistic System of International Trade Governance If there is one thing that is clear, it is that developing country governments and international civil society must not allow their energies to be hijacked into reforming these institutions. This will only amount to administering a facelift to fundamentally flawed institutions. Indeed, today's need is not another centralized global institution, reformed or unreformed, but the deconcentration and decentralization of institutional power and the creation of a pluralistic system of institutions and organizations interacting with one another amidst broadly defined and flexible agreements and understandings. It was under such a more pluralistic global system, where hegemonic power was still far form institutionalized in a set of all encompassing and powerful multilateral organizations that the Latin American countries and many Asian countries were able to achieve a modicum of industrial development in the period from 1950-70. It was under a more pluralistic world system, under a GATT that was limited in its power, flexible, and more sympathetic to the special status of developing countries, that the East and Southeast Asian countries were able to become newly industrializing countries through activist state trade and industrial policies that departed significantly from the free-market biases enshrined in the WTO. The alternative to a powerful WTO is not a Hobbesian state of nature. It is always the powerful that have stoked this fear. The reality of international economic relations in a world marked by a multiplicity of international and regional institutions that check one another is a far cry from the propaganda image of a "nasty" and "brutish" world. Of course, the threat of unilateral action by the powerful is ever present in such a system, but it is one that even the powerful hesitate to take for fear of its consequences on their legitimacy as well as the reaction it would provoke in the form of opposing coalitions. In other words, what developing countries and international civil society should aim at is not to reform the WTO but, through a combination of passive and active measures, to radically reduce its power and to make it simply another international insitution coexisting with and being checked by other international organizations, agreements, and regional groupings. These would include such diverse actors and institutions as UNCTAD, multilateral environmental agreements, the International Labor Organization (ILO), evolving trde blocs such as Mercosur in Latin America, SAARC in South Asia, SADCC in Southern Africa, and ASEAN in Southeast Asia. It is in such a more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world with multiple checks and balances that the nations and communities of the South will be able to carve out the space to develop based on their values, their rhythms, and the strategies of their choice. *Walden Bello, PhD, is executive director of Focus on the Global South and professor of sociology and public administratioon at the University of the Philippines. He attended all three WTO Ministerials as an NGO delegate. He is the author of several works on the WTO including Iron Cage: The WTO, the Bretton Woods Institutions, and the Third World (Bangkok: Focus on the Global South, 1999). 1. Press briefing, Seattle, 2 December 1999. 2. Quoted in "Deadline Set for WTO Reforms," Guardian News Service, Jan. 10, 2000. 3. Figures from World Trade Organization, Annual Report 1998: International Trade Statistics (Geneva: WTO, 1998), p. 12. 4. Quoted in "Cakes and Caviar: The Dunkel Draft and Third World Agriculture," Ecologist, Vol. 23, No. 6 (Nov-Dec. 1993), p. 220. 5. C. Fred Bergsten, Director, Institute for International Economics, Testimony before US Senate, Washington, DC, Oct. 13, 1994. 6. UNCTAD, Trade and Development Report 1991 (New York: United Nations, 1991), p. 191. 7. See discussion of this in Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1990), p. 161. 8. Quoted in John Whaley, "Special and Differential Treatment in the Millenium Round," CSGR Working Paper, No. 30/99 (May 1999), p 3. 9. Ibid., p. 4. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. Ibid., p. 10. 12. Ibid., p. 14. 13. "More Power to the World Trade Organization?", Panos Briefing, Nov. 1999, p. 14. 14. South Center, The Multilateral Trade Agenda and the South (Geneva: South Center, 1998), p. 32. 15. John Whalley, Building Poor Countries' Trading Capacity CSGR Working Paper Series (Warwick: CSGR, March 1999) 16. Secretary of Trade Cesar Bautista, Address to 2nd WTO Ministerial, Geneva, May 18, 1998. 17. C. Fred Bergsten, Director, Institute for International Economics, Terstimony before the US Senate, Washington, DC, Oct. 13, 1994. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Press briefing, Seattle, Washington, Dec. 2, 1999 21. Ibid. 22. "Deadline Set for WTO Reforms," Guardian News Service, Jan. 10, 2000 ****************************************************************************** Focus on the Global South (FOCUS) c/o CUSRI, Chulalongkorn University Bangkok 10330 THAILAND Tel: 662 218 7363/7364/7365/7383 Fax: 662 255 9976 E-mail: N.Bullard@focusweb.org Web Page http://www.focusweb.org Join the fight against hunger. For more information contact foodfirst@foodfirst.org. _____________________________________________________________ Check out the new and improved Topica site! http://www.topica.com/t/13 From aawl at ozramp.net.au Thu Jan 20 10:19:20 2000 From: aawl at ozramp.net.au (AAWL) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 12:19:20 +1100 Subject: [asia-apec 1381] Australian police attack workers Message-ID: <001f01bf62e5$22b3ba20$91fd2acb@power> On 18 and 19 January Western Australian police baton charged workers on picket lines. One union official was hospitalised after being run over by a vehicle that ran through the picket line. Many workers were injured by the baton charges, some needed hospital treatment. Some workers and union officials have been arrested. The workers are picketing BHP mining, processing and shipping in Newman and Port Hedland in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Mining company BHP, supported by the Australian government, is attempting to force union workers to sign individual contracts. This is yet another attempt to destroy the collective strength of union workers. Recent attempts to eliminate union contracts in Australia have included the attack against the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) in 1998, the dispute against the Textile Clothing Footwear Union of Australia (TCFUA) at ADC in Collingwood Melbourne in January 1999, and the nine month lockout against the Australasian Met Industries Employees Union (AMIEU) workers in Pakenham Melbourne during 1999. Australian workers and unions continue to fight back against these attacks. Police violence against workers who are defending their living conditions by taking industrial action must be stopped. Support the workers' union action against BHP. Please send messages of solidarity to: Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, Western Australia; Fax: 08 9481 3303 Australian Workers Union, Western Australia; Fax: 08 9377 2209 Trade and Labour Council of Western Australia; Email: unionsyes@tlcwa.org.au Australian Council of Trade Unions; Email: media@actu.asn.au *** Australia Asia Worker Links PO Box 264 Fitzroy Victoria 3065 Australia Tel: 03 9419 5045 Fax: 03 9416 2746 E-mail: aawl@ozramp.net.au From sbdean at sfu.ca Sat Jan 22 02:11:43 2000 From: sbdean at sfu.ca (Elsie Dean) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 09:11:43 -0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1382] Alternative Biosafety Protocol Message-ID: <3888934F.B194F3D4@sfu.ca> Elsie Dean forwards:Joan Russow, lawyer Green Party member has developed this Alternative Biosafety Protocol and is asking if you agree to sign on and return it to her. This is in response to the international biosafety negotiations in Montreal Canada next week. Subject:[StopWTORound] SIGN-ON ALTERNATIVE BIOSAFETY PROTOCOL Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 23:47:43 -0800 From: Joan Russow <"mailto:jrussow@coastnet.com" mailto:StopWTORound@onelist.com ALTERNATIVE BIOSAFETY PROTOCOL- TO PREVENT HARM TO HUMAN HEALTH, BIODIVERSITY AND THE ENVIRONMENT THE PARTIES TO THIS PROTOCOL RECALLING THAT at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992), the member states of the United Nations made a commitment to prevent the transfer to other states of substances or activities that are harmful to human health or the environment (principle 14, Rio Declaration); RECOGNIZING the serious issues raised by genetic engineering in terms of health and safety, the environment, ethical considerations and social justice;" CONSIDERING the worldwide support for: a global ban on genetically engineered processes, foods, crops and animals (ii) a global ban on the patenting of life forms as being contrary to the "ordre public" public interest) (iii) criminalizing biopiracy and theft of the genetic material and knowledge of farmers, peasants, and indigenous peoples; NOTING THAT the precautionary principle affirms that, where there is a threat to human health or to the environment, the lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent the threat. The precautionary principle has long been a tenet of international customary law and, as such, is required to be integrated into state law This principle is present in documents in differing forms such as the Rio Declaration: Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation." (Rio Declaration, 1992). and the Convention on Biological Diversity: Where there is a threat of significant reduction or loss of biological diversity, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to avoid or minimize such a threat (Preamble, Convention on Biological Diversity, UNCED, 1992). AWARE OF the evidence of hazards arising from genetically engineering foods and crops reported in the World Scientists Statement presented at Cartegena, Columbia, February 1999: "* Herbicide resistant transgenes have spread to wild relatives by cross- pollination in both oilseed rape and sugar beet (Brookes, 1999) creating many species of potential superweeds. * Herbicide-resistant transgenic plants may lead to increased use of herbicides, contrary to what is being claimed. The transgenic plants themselves are already turning up as volunteer plants after the harvest and have to be controlled by additional sprays of other herbicides. * Bt-toxins engineered into a wide range of transgenic plants already released into the environment may build up in the soil and have devastating impacts on pollinators and other beneficial insects (Crecchi, C 1998). * Genetic engineering of organisms is hit- or - miss and not at all precise, contrary to misleading accounts intended for the public, as it depends on the random insertion of the artificial vector carrying the foreign genes into the genome. This random insertion is well-known to have many unexpected and unintended effects, including cancer, in the case of mammalian cells (Walden R, 1991). * Serious doubts over the safety of transgenic foods are raised by new revelations on the results of animal feeding experiments. Potatoes engineered with snowdrop lectin fed to rats caused highly significant reduction in both dry and wet weights of many essential organs: small intestine, liver, spleen, thymus, pancreas and brain. In addition, it resulted in impairment of immunological responsiveness and signs suggestive of viral infection (Leake, C ,1999). Hazards may come from new genes and gene products. New genes and gene products are introduced into food, often from bacteria and viruses and other non-food species that have never been eaten before and certainly not in the quantities produced in the genetically engineered crops, where they are typically expressed at high levels. The long term impacts of these genes and gene products on human health will be impossible to predict * Genetically engineered agriculture not only obstructs the implementation of real solutions to the problems of food security for all, but also poses unprecedented risks to health and biodiversity. Far from feeding the world, it will intensify corporate control on food production and distribution which created poverty and hunger in the first place. It will also reinforce existing social structures and intensive agricultural practices that have led to widespread environmental destruction and falling yields since the 1980s (Brown, L R,. (1998)" {Excerpts from the World Scientists' Statement} RECOGNIZING THAT the global community has made a commitment to the international principle of customary law-the precautionary principle. This principle states that where there is a threat to human health or the environment, the lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason to postpone measures to prevent the threat. There is sufficient scientific evidence of the harmful health and environmental consequences of GE foods and crops to justify the banning of GE foods and crops, the end to export of GE foods and crops and the immediate removal of GE foods from grocery shelves in accordance with the precautionary principle. RECALLING THAT an exception to the patenting of inventions arises when the invention is contrary to "ordre public" or morality; this explicitly includes inventions dangerous to human, animal or plant life or health or seriously prejudicial to the environment and applies where the commercial exploitation of the invention must also be prevented and this prevention is necessary for the protection of order public or morality; CONCURRING WITH THE World Scientists Statement that " Genetic engineering is a new departure from conventional breeding and introduces significant differences. Conventional breeding involves crossing related species, and plants with the desired characteristics selected from among the progeny for reproducing, and the selection is repeated over many generations. Genetic engineering bypasses reproduction altogether. It transfers genes horizontally from one individual to another (as opposed to vertically from parent to offspring), often making use of infectious agents as vectors or carriers of genes so that genes can be transferred between distant species that would never interbreed in nature. For example human genes are transferred into pig, sheep, fish and bacteria. Toad genes are transferred into tomatoes. Completely new exotic genes are being introduces into food crops." (World Scientists Statement, 1999) NOTING THAT The current practices of genetic engineering are creating unpredictable and irreversible combinations of transgenic organisms with one another and with natural varieties and, as such, are defeating the purpose of the Convention on Biological Diversity; NOTING THAT under the Vienna Law of Treaties, the signatories to the Convention must not create a situation that would make it impossible for them to discharge their obligations under the treaty and that the creation of unpredictable and irreversible combinations of transgenic organisms with one another with natural varieties would defeat the purpose of the Convention to "conserve biodiversity"; RECOGNIZING THAT genetic engineering in the area of medical research raises serious questions of ethics and social justice; RECALLING THAT Under the UN Convention on Women, Equality, Development and Peace (1995) and Habitat II (1996), the member states of the United Nations made a commitment to ensure that corporations (including transnational corporations comply with international law, including international environmental law; MINDFUL that member states of the United Nations have failed to sign and ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity along with other relevant treaties, covenants and conventions, and that under the Vienna Law of Treaty states are bound not to do anything in the interim between the signing and the coming into force of the treaty to defeat the purpose of the convention; HAVE AGREED TO THE FOLLOWING: * to invoke the precautionary principle and institute an immediate ban on all genetically engineered processes, foods, crops and animals; * to embark upon the immediate removal of GE foods from grocery shelves; * to invoke the "ordre public" principle and ban the patenting of living organisms and their parts; * to criminalize biopiracy and theft of genetic material and knowledge of farmers, peasants, and indigenous peoples; * to place a moratorium on genetically engineered medical research into uses of genetic engineering until ethical standards can be put in place; * to urge the full ratification of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the enactment of domestic legislation to ensure compliance. SIGN-0N NAME ADDRESS COUNTRY E-MAIL PLEASE SEND COPY TO mailto:jrussow@coastnet.com Joan Russow PhD Global Compliance Research Project 1 250 598-0071 --------------------------- ONElist Sponsor ---------------------------- From src_st at hyd.netasia.com.pk Sat Jan 22 18:55:05 2000 From: src_st at hyd.netasia.com.pk (Sasp) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 14:55:05 +0500 Subject: [asia-apec 1383] Protest-WCD study on Tarbela Dam Pakistan-Lobbying for Kalabagh Dam Message-ID: <006201bf64be$c93c4f80$510038d2@ayazl> Protest-WCD study on Tarbela Dam Pakistan-Lobbying for Kalabagh Dam We Mahfooz Ursani coordinator Pakistan Network of Rivers, Dams and People (PNRDP), Ayaz Latif Palijo Chairman Sindh Research Council (SRC) and Rafiq Abbassi coordinator Sindh NGO Forum on NDP would like to submit our view point regarding the final stake holders meeting of Tarbela Dam hosted by Asianics Consultants and WCD on 17-18 January 2000 at Sheraton Hotel, Karachi Pakistan to review the development effectiveness and its consequences for lower Indus Ecology. As a coordinator Sindh Mahfooz Ursani and Rafik Abassi after attending the first day of the meeting, boycotted the second day?s proceedings because the whole exercise was carefully designed to get pre determined result in favour of proposed large hydropower dams. In this connection we submit as under: 1. Invitations were issued to participants majority of which were already favoring the biased report of Tarbela case study released by ? ASIANICS? sponsored by WCD (World Commission on Dams). The majority of the participants didn?t represent the adversely affected fields and area of Indus river basin. 2. The adopted procedure of WCD / Asianics meeting provided no option for arguments and was deliberately leaded to acquire the optimum desired results for Kalabagh Dam. 3. It was absolutely unnecessary to prolong this meeting for two days. The motive behind was to influence opinion of the participants by delaying tactics and by facilitating them lunches, dinners and accommodation in a 5 star hotel like Sheraton. 4. The surveys conducted by questioner during this meeting included questions which if answered yes or no, in both ways served the purpose of agreeing the study report and giving consent in favour of construction of future large dam projects. WE the PNRDP, SRC and NGO Forum in our joint statement condemn this conspiracy for justification of the proposed construction of Kalabagh Dam, misconduct, misinformation and methodology of the Karachi meeting. We out rightly reject this study report as the final findings are anti people and anti environment, biased, fictitious and unauthentic, methodology for collection of data is defected and the area of study is limited to upper region of Tarbela only. Real and factual adverse effects , which occurred in the lower region i.e. from Sukkur to Indus delta and Arabian sea are not incorporated and inducted in this study report. We are also concerned about the role of WCD and WB in this regard as no appropriate criteria was followed for the selection of Consultants to conduct this study and ultimately a biased consultancy firm was given the contract which is headed and owned by pro WAPDA ex bureaucrat who had been involved in bribing the ?Fuedals? in General Zia?s regime through agriculture loans to acquire unjustified favors from them. We therefore urge World Commission on Dams (WCD), World Bank, International Rivers Network (IRN) and all other concerned forums and organizations to take serious notice of this heinous exercise and put their efforts together to stop this scam and help us to promote environment friendly future and prosperity in this region. We wish to take this opportunity to appreciate and thank Dr. Aslam Pervez Umrani, G N Mughal, Mishka Zaman, Khalid Husain, Aly Ercelwan, Aijaz Qureshi, Noman, Mushtaq Gadhi, Naz Sahto and Suboor for their bold, positive, pro-people and anti Dam stand. Mahfooz Ursani 92-221-780225 maf914@hyd.paknet.com.pk ursani@yahoo.com Ayaz Latif Palijo 92-221-651947 psrc@hyd.paknet.com.pk Rafik Musrtafa Abbasi 92-320-4156442 B-24, Faraz Villaz 2-Qasimabad Hyderabad Sindh Pakistan From kmp at quickweb.com.ph Tue Jan 25 09:00:37 2000 From: kmp at quickweb.com.ph (KMP) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 08:00:37 +0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1384] Philippines: Peasants Call for Estrada's Ouster Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.20000125080037.007a4500@pop.skyinet.net> KMP (Peasant Movement of the Philippines) NEWS RELEASE 23 January 2000 Mendiola marchers demand Estrada ouster MILITANT peasant and fishworker groups marched behind victims of human rights violations on the 13th anniversary of the Mendiola massacre. Together they called for the ouster of President Joseph Estrada. It was the first major anti-government protest action in the Philippines for the year 2000. Leading the march on Malaca?ang is the Kilusang Enero 22, a group of widows and orphans of the thirteen peasants massacred on January 22, 1987 by the marines and police who blocked and later fired at a big peasant march of 11,000 people demanding genuine land reform. ?The Filipino people now tell Estrada to leave the country with his militarist clique Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief Panfilo Lacson and Department of Interiors and Local Government (DILG) Secretary Alfredo Lim, and together with the Marcoses and crony Danding Cojuangco. Erap should bring along his drinking buddies and those among his friends, relatives and mistresses who like leaches are sucking our economy and government coffers dry the way the Marcos cronies did!? said Rafael Mariano, chair of the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), the peasant alliance that started the campaign thirteen years ago. Mariano said the appointment of Lim to the DILG not only is an exoneration of his role in the brutal carnage of peasants under the US-Aquino regime but is proof of the rapid restoration of open fascist repression and intensified militarization under Oplan Makabayan. ?Estrada is a consistent anti-poor and anti-democratic puppet of US imperialism and landlord interests, shown by the worsening landlessness and landgrabbing, as he surrendered the economy and the country's patrimony to foreign monopoly capital and their local partners. And on top of that is his racketeering in financial scandals of his gambling cronies. ?Impeachment is not enough for him. A tyrant like him must be taught a lesson like the infamous dictator Marcos. He deserves to be humiliated and sent running by an angry people. Stanley Ho?s floating casino Jumbo Palace is big enough to take all of them away,? Mariano said. He is reacting to calls made by the parliamentary opposition and business sectors for Estrada's removal in the wake of the scandal surrounding his involvement in the insider trading scam perpetrated by crony Dante Tan and Macau gambling lord Ho. The KMP statement junked a promise made by Estrada early in his term that justice will be given to the Mendiola martyrs. His fake land reform projects and the manipulation of the coconut levy talks that favor Cojuanco and other big landlords are proof that he will never work for the farmers. Speakers from different cause-oriented groups like the Central Luzon Aeta Association (CLAA), Pamalakaya, KMU, Bayan, LFS, Courage and Gabriela took turns in denouncing the Estrada regime's record of human rights violations, destruction of the economy, cronyism and Erap's personal propensity for womanizing and drinking. The KMU trade union center announced the resumption of noise barrages for a nationwide pay hike of 125 pesos and against the incessant price manipulation by the oil cartel of pump prices. Meanwhile, the Filipino community in Los Angeles led by Bayan International and Pesante USA are mobilizing a multicultural march in front of the Philippine consulate in sympathy with the Mendiola massacre victims. # From cegp2 at journalist.com Tue Jan 25 09:19:34 2000 From: cegp2 at journalist.com (CEGP) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 08:19:34 +0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1385] [cegp2] MARTIAL LAW IN SCHOOLS, DE FACTO NO MORE Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.20000125081934.007a8770@pop.skyinet.net> CEGP (College Editors Guild of the Philippines) 15 Jan. 2000 Martial law in schools, de facto no more Historically and in fact, police and military elements are coercive tools of government. They are there to stifle the government's opponents - whether real or imagined. It is there to make students and the people uphold the status quo no matter how unjust, cruel and rotten the latter may be. This is best shown in how the they operate their schools (like the Philippine Military Academy), their human rights record, their appreciation of these rights and other civil liberties and their leaders (Estrada, Lacson and Lim). And indeed, this was best shown in under martial law when the police and military roamed the entire country. They transformed campuses and the entire country into garrisons. As such, the College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP) joins the people in condemning the deployment of Marines in malls and schools. We deem this as an insult to the pass efforts of the student movement to remove these fascist brutes from our lives, including centers of learning. We shall not make this pass. And by favoring any such plan, President Estrada is reaffirming his reputation as the single-biggest enemy of press freedom and other democratic rights. Allowing these fascist brutes to reenter campuses will worsen the already deteriorating human rights situation on campus. They will play a role in dousing cold water and maiming student activists and the others whose only crime is to raise their voices against so many injustices on campus. They are needed by school officials to frustrate the impending student boycotts against the 18th round of tuition fee increases since the approval of the Education Act of 1982. On the other hand, this is nothing new. The difference now is that there now a formal character to the de facto martial law long plaguing the nation's schools. Prior to this, administrators of many public and private schools have sought police assistance for traffic and security like the Philippine School for Business Administration and the University of the Philippines, both in Quezon City. In many others, these two parties - the police and school officials - sign agreements for study grants and discounts for cops. In others, like when the Philippines hosted the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, policemen and PMA cadets were deployed in various schools in Central Luzon. Ostensibly, they study or help schools in security matters. But they are very convenient in instilling a climate of fear and for pouring cold water on embers of student dissent. Not unless President Estrada wants to inspire more vigorous, mammoth, marathon protests from students, his government should shelve the plan to put Marines in schools. No thanks to President Estrada himself, there are more reasons to go to the streets on Jan. 24, the National Day of Action for Press Freedom. # From notoapec at clear.net.nz Fri Jan 28 04:07:35 2000 From: notoapec at clear.net.nz (APEC Monitoring Group) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 11:07:35 -0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1386] Fw: India, the WTO and capitalist globalization Message-ID: <000801bf68f9$c64c5560$553261cb@notoapec> -----Original Message----- From: jaggi singh >[A slightly different version of this article was to appear in the >Alternatives supplement of HOUR magazine, a weekly newspaper published in >Montreal.] > >India, the WTO and capitalist globalization >by Jaggi Singh > >BHOPAL, INDIA, January 13, 2000 ? Mike Moore, the shell-shocked >Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), is visiting India >this week to meet with "top officials and business leaders". It?s all part >of a concerted attempt at damage control after the victory of diverse >peoples? movements at the Battle of Seattle. According to a WTO envoy in >Geneva, "Moore clearly sees India as a key to kick-starting the negotiation >process." [Reuters, January 7, 2000]. > >[In an interview with India Today Magazine [January 24, 2000], Moore spoke >of the "liberating force of globalisation" and declared it "a reality, not a >policy." In Moore?s words, "The era of "isms" is over." He didn?t mention >"capitalISM."] > >The official Indian government delegation to the Seattle WTO Ministerial >meetings took a hard-line stance, at least publicly, against linking trade >to labour and environmental standards. It was a position supported by all >the major parliamentary factions, including the so-called left parties. >Indeed, the government?s view not only echoes that of other governments in >the "Third World", but is critically supported by the majority of >progressive opponents of globalization in India and the rest of South Asia. > >It?s not that activists here are "soft" or relativistic about labour >standards, the environment or human rights; nor are they na?ve about whom >the Indian government really represents. Rather, they see Western >governments? apparent discovery of universal human values and standards as a >ploy to ensure a competitive advantage for their own multinational >companies. This view is widespread in countries like India, with its own >historical context of colonialism, and contemporary context of >neo-colonialism (with which the "holy trinity" of the WTO, International >Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) are considered synonymous). > >According to Sanjay Mangala Gopal, the co-coordinator of the National >Alliance of People?s Movements (NAPM, representing some 125 grassroots >organizations): "We will define our own way of development and we are >capable of doing it. Who are you to teach us about child labour or anything >else?" > >Gopal insists that voices from the South -- where the majority of the >world?s marginalized peoples live and survive ? should provide the >leadership to the international resistance to globalization (by definition, >this includes those pockets of the Third World in the North, such as many >indigenous and minority communities in North America). The analysis >emanating from diverse sources in the Third World ? not just the communists >? revolves around the "Three Aunties." > >They?re not talking about a kindly trio of female relatives who pamper their >nephews and nieces, but an analysis of the WTO and related institutions that >is "anti-imperialist", "anti-colonial" and "anti-capitalist," phrases which >are seemingly alien to most mainstream anti-globalization movements in the >North. As Gopal puts it, "If you want real change, you have to abolish the >capitalistic mode of development." > >In the forceful words of R. Geetha, a union and women?s rights activist >based in Madras, "Who are they [the West] to impose conditions on >third-world countries? People are starving here! Why the hell should they >tell us what kind of economy we should have?" > >Meanwhile, Medha Patkar, a leading organizer of the Narmada Bachao Andolan >(NBA, a more-than-decade long mass movement against destructive development >and displacement in the Narmada River Valley of India) is not shy in saying: >"The ultimate goal is to say no to the WTO. We?re against the whole >capitalist system." > >As for the clear emphasis by major Western labour, environmental and >consumer organizations that the WTO needs to be reformed -- the "fair trade" >crowd -- activists here respond with varying degrees of diplomacy. In the >carefully chosen words of Patkar, "The context of developed and developing >countries is different. Those who are for reforms [will] realize over a >period of time that these institutions [WB, IMF and WTO] are beyond reform." > >In Geetha?s view, "I think the organized American working class is worried >about American capital going to the Third World to exploit conditions >there." She adds, "That?s an indirect fight." > >Meanwhile, one small independent Bombay monthly (which describes itself as >"a monthly that challenges the ideas of the ruling classes") writes that >"[t]he big labour unions and environmental groups" were those "whose demands >almost mirrored that of the US government." [The Voice of People Awakening, >December 1999.] > >Geetha insists on having a "direct fight" against globalization, while Gopal >feels that many opponents of globalization "are looking at this issue with >one eye," by ignoring, or downplaying, the voices of the South. > >While there is a strong basis of analytical unity by India?s numerous >activist groups and movements, their tactics in action are diverse, >reflective of the complex -- cliched but true -- diversity of the >subcontinent itself. The actions range from Gandhian-style non-violence to >more militant forms of direct action (including property destruction) to >armed struggle in certain rural pockets of the country. To a large extent >the tactics are complementary, but it would be too idealistic to assert >they?re not also at times at odds with each other. However, there is often a >strong sense of solidarity expressed between movements. It?s what Patkar >describes as "different strategies, but same goals" which is to be preferred >to "same strategies, but different goals" (after all, right-wing fanatics >also employ non-violence, property destruction or armed struggle as >tactics). > >One group directly connected to the international anti-globalization >movement is the KRRS, the Karnataka State Farmer?s Movement, representing >thousands of peasant farmers in the southern state of Karnataka. In recent >years, the KRRS has physically dismantled -- with iron bars -- a Cargill >seed unit, trashed another office of the same multinational agribusiness, >burned Monsanto?s field trials of biotech cotton, and trashed a Kentucky >Fried Chicken outlet in Bangalore. [Their actions put in some perspective >the recent debate about so-called "violence against property" in Seattle.] > >The KRRS has also been a major component of the People?s Global Action >against "Free" Trade (PGA) movement, which unites peoples? movements on five >continents (including the Zapatistas of southern Mexico and the Landless >Peasants? Movement (MST) of Brazil). The PGA?s "hallmarks" are a clear >rejection of the WTO and similar institutions and agreements, a >confrontational attitude, a call to non-violent disobedience, and >decentralization and autonomy as organizing principles. The PGA also added a >fifth hallmark at their recent meeting in Bangalore which "rejects all forms >and systems of domination and discrimination including, but not limited to, >patriarchy, racism and religious fundamentalism of all creeds." > >According to the recent PGA bulletin, "The "denunciation of "free" trade >without an analysis of patriarchy, racism and processes of homogenization is >a basic element of the discourse of the right, and perfectly compatible with >simplistic explanations of complex realities, and with the personification >of the effects of capitalism (such as conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, >etc.) that inevitably lead to fascism, witch-hunting and oppressive >chauvinist traditionalism." In the Indian context, the new hallmark serves >to distinguish progressive internationalist opponents of globalization, like >the KRRS, NAPM and NBA, from the Hindu Right who also employ much of the >same rhetoric of the anti-globalization movement. > >And so, on November 30, while a state of emergency was declared in Seattle, >and various militarized police forces proceeded to brutalize thousands of >anti-WTO demonstrators, the KRRS organized it?s own demonstration in >Bangalore. Several thousand farmers, along with their allies, issued a "Quit >India" notice to multinational food and biotech conglomerate, Monsanto. > >In the spirited words of one speaker at the rally: "We don't want to grow >and feed poisonous food by using the genetically modified seeds of Monsanto. >It is our responsibility to protect our natural resources. I would like to >tell the police to be prepared! We will attack Monsanto unless it quits >India." > >The KRRS action on N30 is just one example of the spate of recent >anti-globalization oriented protests on the subcontinent (although >mobilizations against the WB and IMF started in earnest in the mid-1980s). >For example, also on N30, activists of the NBA organized a 1000-strong >non-violent procession in the Narmada Valley "protesting against the >anti-human agreements and institutions that are pushing India and the rest >of the world into the destructive process of capitalist globalisation." > >One week earlier, 300 adivasis (indigenous peoples) from the state of Madhya >Pradesh stormed the World Bank offices in Delhi. They proceeded to block the >building and cover it with posters, graffiti, cow shit and mud (yet again, >more violence to property!). The protesters left a letter, which reads in >part, "We fought against the British and we will fight against the new form >of colonialism that you represent with all our might." > >Other adivasi activists are also currently engaged in a six-month long >procession ("padyatra") from one end of Madhya Pradesh to the other in order >to highlight the ever-hastening process of land displacement in the name of >globalization. > >Meanwhile, just two days ago, the non-violent protesters of the NBA >converged on the Maheshwar dam (one part of the Narmada dam system) and >proceeded to illegally occupy the dam site. About 4000 took over the site, >while 1500 were eventually arrested by the police who responded by attacking >some demonstrators. > >The protests show no sign of ending, with the NAPM promising to disrupt Bill >Clinton?s anticipated visit to India in March. Their chosen slogans include, >"Go bank foreign exploiter Clinton!" The NAPM will stress "opposition to >exploiting US rulers but friendship with all those Americans who support >us." > >These examples don?t even account for other ongoing movements of indigenous >persons, fisherfolk, farmers, labour activists, low caste and Dalit (former >"untouchables") organizations, youth and individuals in all parts of India. >More information on those resistance struggles, and India?s rush towards >adopting free-market globalization, will be appearing in these pages in the >upcoming months. > >[Jaggi Singh is a writer, independent journalist and political activist >based in Montreal. He is currently writing and traveling in India. For more >information, or a longer, in-depth version of this article, contact him by >e-mail or by phone at 514-526-8946.] > >______________________________________________________ >Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > > From tpl at cheerful.com Thu Jan 27 09:54:12 2000 From: tpl at cheerful.com (tpl@cheerful.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 08:54:12 +0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1387] UNITY STATEMENT (Congress of Migrante Intl) Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.20000127085412.007c0db0@pop.skyinet.net> UNITY STATEMENT Second Congress Migrante International 16 December 1999 We are representatives of over 50 progressive organizations of Filipinos overseas who gathered here in Laguna province for the Second Congress of Migrante International. This congress is being held to assess our work for the past three years, discuss the recurring issues confronting Filipino compatriots abroad and unite us on the line and orientation of Migrante International, and the direction the progressive alliance of overseas Filipinos will be taking in the years to come. Many things have happened since our first congress in 1996. Today, the country has a new president who claims to be "pro-poor" but is, in reality, a rabid defender of imperialists and the local ruling classes of compradors and big landlords. Since it assumed power in 1998, the Estrada regime has ensured the sell out of the country to imperialism, thus further plunging the Filipino people into deeper depths of impoverishment and misery. The ever-worsening crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal system in the Philippines remains the major factor that forces Filipinos to swallow the government's bitter labor export scheme and leave the country in droves to look for gainful employment abroad. The continuing feudal and semifeudal conditions in the country have continued to produce unemployment, poverty and hunger. Many of the peasant population are driven to seek food, shelter and clothing in the urban areas. However, jobs are also nowhere to be found in the cities because there is no intention to generate mass employment and no comprehensive pro-people economic plan that will genuinely harness national industrialization, employment and national development - the basic ingredients necessary to create decent and gainful employment. The few jobs available are subject to downsizing or total collapse depending on the whims of the compradors and the imperialists. They can subject the working class to all forms of exploitation and abuse, including regular firings or terminations because anyway there is a very large reserve of unemployed waiting to take over from those who would fight for their rights and welfare. It is revolting that while Estrada is hell-bent on amending the constitution to grant big foreign transnational corporations 100-percent ownership of our land, Filipinos in their thousands are driven away to become practically slaves in foreign countries. The US-Estrada regime has totally abdicated its responsibility to provide employment for its people and has instead intensified the commodification of the Filipino people through its labor export policy. The labor export policy is not only a counterrevolutionary scheme to stem the tide of growing discontent, but is also an oppressive measure to milk overseas Filipinos of their hard-earned income to prop up the bankrupt Philippine economy and the inutile and corrupt political bureaucracy. With the billions of dollars being remitted by Filipinos overseas, the regime manages to collect the money it needs in servicing the country's foreign debt and balancing its trade and balance of payment deficits. The labor export policy has also been gradually destroying and breaking up the Filipino family and thus, the very source of our cultural and moral values. The current fascist president is no different from its predecessor Ramos in the further intensification of the export of Filipino labor. But Estrada is trying to upstage Ramos by vigorously implementing and creating mechanisms for a well-trained, cheaper and docile labor for export. It recycled an old Marcos government agency and renamed it the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) which is headed by a former progressive-turned-rabid-pro-imperialist, and it introduced another old anti-people capitalist scheme called the Job Fair Program under the Department of Labor. It is indeed ironic that overseas Filipinos are now the ones propping up the prevailing semifeudal and semicolonial system that has forced them to leave the country in the first place. Not content with this, the Estrada regime continues to steal from migrant Filipinos' hard-earned income by shamelessly exacting various fees, levies and taxes. Despite their important role in keeping the Philippine economy from total collapse, Filipinos overseas do not get even the most basic support and protection from the state, which, in most cases take the side of the receiving countries whenever a conflict arises. Endless is the litany of ordeals suffered by overseas Filipinos: breach of contract, physical and sexual abuse, racial attack and discrimination, arrest and imprisonment, and death. Due to various reasons-from being abandoned by their employers to simply trying to prolong their stay-thousands of Filipinos have also become "illegal" waiting to be repatriated or choosing to go on eking out a living to support their families back home and risk of being jailed. Now known as undocumented workers, this group of migrant Filipinos has become more vulnerable than ever. Since our first congress, Migrante International has grown by leaps and bounds because of our comprehensive organizing work among overseas Filipinos. Needless to say, it is necessary to further intensify our struggle, given the fact that the situation of overseas Filipinos under the present fascist Estrada regime continues to worsen. We have a lot to do. And our further advance is largely dependent on how we conduct the tasks ahead of us. Key to this is our firm grasp of the principles that are reflected in the theme we have adopted for our second congress. We have to overcome this weakness in the grasp of our orientation. We can do this by deepening our understanding and social investigation of the phenomenon of commodification, and by rooting out the cause of migration from the semicolonial and semifeudal character of the country. Towards this end, the different countries represented in the second congress can initiate "echoing congresses" in their respective country or area of responsibility to achieve this goal of fully grasping our line and orientation that addresses not only Filipino migrants but Filipino immigrants as well. It is of utmost importance that we further strengthen and expand our ranks. To do this, we have to learn from the victories gained by our compatriots in a number of countries in their organizing work. At the same time, we also have to advance and enliven our campaigns against the commodification of our compatriots abroad and to relate this struggle with the struggle being waged in the Philippines. It is our duty as progressive Filipinos overseas to join and support the national democratic struggle of our compatriots in the homefront. Lastly and more importantly, we are united in the analysis that since it is the semifeudal and semicolonial system that is at the root of Filipino migration, only by putting an end to this system and the overthrow of the class rule of the compradors and big landlords and their imperialist lords, can our country achieve genuine national industrialization, economic prosperity, democracy, development and genuine peace. -o0o- MIGRANTE International's contact address: 56-C Masikap Street, Bgy. Pinyahan Teacher's Village, Quezon City PHILIPPINES phone: 435-9152; telefax: 435-6929 e-mail: migranteintl@pacific.net.hk From tpl at cheerful.com Thu Jan 27 09:59:41 2000 From: tpl at cheerful.com (tpl@cheerful.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 08:59:41 +0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1388] College Editors demand Estrada's ouster Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.20000127085941.007a6ac0@pop.skyinet.net> CEGP (College Editors Guild of the Philippines) January 22, 2000 ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! KICK OUT ERAP! ENEMY OF PRESS FREEDOM, HUMAN RIGHTS AND PEACE Today, campus journalists and students join the people in demanding the ouster of President Estrada (aka ERAP). His continued stay in office is disastrous to press freedom, human rights and peace. His ouster will be greatly beneficial to journalists and the people. We have every reason to demand Estrada's ouster. Directly or by proxy, President Estrada has assumed the role as the number one kontrabida of people's rights especially press freedom. We hold him accountable for the long list of crimes against the people's right to know, press freedom, human rights and peace: 1) the favoritism in granting interviews with Palace reporters 2) the buyout by the family of Estrada crony Mark Jimenez of the Manila Times 3) the earlier libel suit and subsequent closure of the Manila Times 4) the advertising boycott against the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the earlier ban on the latter's reporters in Palace press conferences 5) the clampdown on over 300 student newspapers 6) the deployment of Marines in Manila and the planned deployment of combat troops in universities and colleges 7) the appointment of human rights violators Alfredo Lim and Panfilo Lacson 8) the murder of Southern Mindanao youth leader Larry Padron 9) the cancellation of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law 10) the cancellation of peace negotiations with the National Democratic Front These attacks came in tandem with disastrous programs that have caused more misery and hardships on students and the people. For students, among these policies are the P700-million cut on the education budget and new tuition fee increases. Others are the repeated price increases, Visiting Forces Agreement, Chacha/Concord, the exoneration of the Marcoses from their human rights violations, cronyism, graft and corruption and many more. These attacks on human rights and civil liberties are essential in fighting off the struggle of students and the people against the Estrada government. The wanton violations of human rights and civil liberties find its policy direction from the OPLAN MAKABAYAN, the so-called anti-insurgency strategy that focuses on physically eliminating "subversive" elements instead of resolving the root causes of social conflict. President Estrada's pronouncements "kung di madala sa santong paspasan, dalhin sa bakbakan" betrays his fascism masked by "pro-poor" rhetoric. By ousting this government, we have much to gain. We stand to benefit from the elimination of a violator of press freedom, human rights and peace. We stand to benefit from a reprieve from this government's terrible brand of governance. On Monday, Jan. 24, we enjoin all freedom- and peace-loving people to join us in a Day of Action and say, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! KICK OUT ERAP! # From amittal at foodfirst.org Sat Jan 29 09:53:35 2000 From: amittal at foodfirst.org (Anuradha Mittal) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 16:53:35 -0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1389] Alert on Biotech Industry using "Organic" as Trojan Horse Message-ID: <0.700000824.972821189-951758591-949107215@topica.com> 21.01.2000 Dear friends, The biotech as organic stunt is being replayed in India after its defeat in the USA. On February 8th 2000, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is holding a meeting on "the Role of Business Partnership in Promoting Trade and Sustainable Development" to promote biotechnology as Organic.Please send letters the UNDP chief in the US and the resident representative of UNDP in India to scrap this meeting and hold a meeting on sustainable agriculture and organic farming in association with full participation of the Agriculture Ministry and of the organic agriculture movements in India. I enclose an Alert which you can circulate among your friends. The address of UNDP Resident representative in India is Dr. Brenda Gael Mcsweeney, United Nations Development Programme, 55 - Lodi Estate, Post Box No. 3059, New Dlhi - 110003 -India Tel: 0091-11-4628877, Fax: 91-11-4627612 Email: ind@undp.org URL: http://www.undp.org.in UNDP Chief in USA Mark Mallock Brown Chief of Administration, UNDP 1, UN Plaza, New York, USA Tel: 001 - 212 - 8262058, 9065001 Email: registries@undp.org ______________________________________________________________________ Let Organic - Stay Organic Alert: The Biotech Industry uses "Organic" as Trojan Horse to enter Indian Market On February 8th 2000, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is holding a meeting on "the Role of Business Partnership in Promoting Trade and Sustainable Development" to promote biotechnology as Organic. This attempt to sell Genetically Engineered (G. E.) as organic had earlier been used in USA, but failed due to the protests by thousands of organic farmers and consumers. The fact that organic is being used as a Trojan Horse to launch G. E. products in India is evident from the total absence of the organic farming movement in the UNDP programme. In fact even the Agriculture Ministry is missing from the programme. Instead, it is officials of the Commerce Ministry who will be dealing with organic farming. Representatives of Mahyco, the Indian seed company bought up by the US Biotech company Monsanto, through whom Monsanto plans to launch its G.E. products in India, will be playing a leading role in the public private partnership. While last year Monsanto was visible and aggresive imarekting G.E. crops in India, it now operates in biotech debates using MAHYCO using as a shield. Indian farmers organisation had uprooted Monsanto's G.E. field trials in December 1998. The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi, has also filed a case in the Indian Supreme Court to stop the field trials since they violate Biosafety regulations at every level. Since the global biotechnology industry is facing popular resistance in India, an attempt is being made to launch biotechnology via the public sector and as an organic option. We are concerned that instead of promoting genuine organic agriculture and biosafety, the UNDP is helping the biotech industry by confusing G.E. as organic and use the public sector to launch G.E. products. This is an attempt to hijack the organic label for the biotech industry. While using organic as a Trojan Horse, the unleashing of G.E. products in India will undermine organic agriculture by creating genetic pollution. This is yet another attempt by the biotech industry interests to undo the Biosafety Protocol negotiations currently underway in Montreal, and to reduce all biotech discussion to trade by taking them to WTO. This attempt to take Biotech to WTO was made at Seattle but failed because of protests by citizens, Third World countries and European Environment Ministers. We want organic to stay organic and be kept totally separate from G.E. We want the public sector to play a public role in working with farmers to evolve farmers' varieties of the desired crops that India grows and needs so that our biodiversity, sustainable agriculture and diverse food systems can be kept alive. Join the fight against hunger. For more information contact foodfirst@foodfirst.org. ______________________________________________ Faster, stronger and able to send millions of emails in one click: the new Topica site! http://www.topica.com/t/14 From cegp2 at journalist.com Mon Jan 31 08:22:04 2000 From: cegp2 at journalist.com (CEGP) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 07:22:04 +0800 Subject: [asia-apec 1390] Philippines: STUDENTS CONFRONT ESTRADA Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.20000131072204.007aad60@pop.skyinet.net> CEGP (College Editors Guild of the Philippines) Budget cut protest STUDENTS CONFRONT ERAP ILOILO CITY-As riot police brutally truncheoned and hose down protesting students near the Malacaqang gate last January 27, nearly 1500 students of the University of the Philippines in the Visayas Region (UPV) in Miag-ao and Iloilo City (total population: less than 3,000) stormed President Estrada's visit to Iloilo City in protest of the slashing of UP's budget. Estrada's was here for a two-day official visit to Iloilo and Antique where he handed out grants and inaugurated infrastructure projects. But many observers here saw the trip as an attempt to boost his popularity rating in the Visayas where he scored the lowest according to recent surveys. The students, including 200 UPV high school students, braved the rain and marched to the Iloilo shipping port where the President was set to inaugurate the newly constructed Iloilo passenger ferry terminal. The protesters swelled to nearly 3000 after the UPV students joined with urban poor groups and workers under the BAYAN-Panay (New Patriotic Alliance -- Panay Chapter). The urban poor groups were protesting the widespread demolition in Iloilo City with 25 of the city's 180 barangays set to be demolished early this year. Th protests caught police and the Presidential Security Group (PSG) by surprise forcing the presidential entourage to make an unscheduled stop at a hotel minutes after Estrada arrived from Manila. The President waited for at least 30 minutes until hundreds of police blocked the protesters 500 meters from the inauguration site. Earlier, members of the city's task force on garbage collection removed protest streamers at the UPV Iloilo City campus. One of the streamers declared the campus "Marines-Free." Hundreds of students led by the broad alliance UPV-Students Forum from the main campus in Miag-ao, 42 kms. south of here, joined with students of the College of Management and high school students in the Iloilo City campus where a short program was held before the march rally took off. The protest was part of the ongoing campaign of major youth and student groups here against the cut in the education budget. The groups include the League of Filipino Students (LFS), Anakbayan, Samahan ng mga Mag-aaral at Kabataang Kababaihan (Samaka-Association of Women Youth & Students)), UPV Oikos, Student Christian Movement of the Philippines (SCMP), CEGP, and National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP). Rowena Narciso, CEGP-Iloilo