WTO Euphemisms

December 13th, 2005 at 21:08 Björn Hallberg

Need we worry or have the poorer nations risen to the call? And if so, will they, emboldened by their non-cooperation, save us from ourselves?

Zmag (Vandana Shiva) - The WTO Ministerial at Hong Kong has already failed. For the corporate world it has failed because smaller, poorer developing countries are starting to have a say in outcomes of WTO negotiations. With the backing of peoples power on the streets they walked out of the Seattle and Cancun ministerial, exercising the highest power in democracy, the power to say ‘no’, the power exercised by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the power of non-cooperation with unjust rule.

As usual, the powerful countries, driven by their even more powerful corporations wanted both to prevent the mandatory reforms of the agreements that establish corporate monopolies in agriculture, seeds and medicines, as well as to introduce new issues like non-agricultural market access (NAMA) and further distort the already distorted GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services). It is to introduce new issues that they refer to a new “Doha Round” when in fact we are in the implementation period of the Uruguay Round. To placate the developing countries with doublespeak, they refer to the “Doha Development Round”.

See also:
Setting the Trade Debate
WTO hype and all that junk

Entry 373 filed under: Economy. This entry was posted 2 years, 11 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.