FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT GLOBALIZATION
AND ALTERNATIVES

The WTO was set up in 1995, to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which reduced tariffs (taxes on imports) and quotas (limits on the amount of imports).

Uruguay Round of negotiations (1986-93) gave the WTO enough power to overrule any law, as long as it could be linked to trade.

Officially, decisions in the WTO are made by voting or consensus. However, rich countries, especially the so-called QUAD countries (U.S., Canada, Japan and the European Union), repeatedlyhave made the most important decisions in meetings without the other, poorer WTO nations.

In the end, cases are decided by a panel of three trade bureaucrats.

There are no conflict of interest rules, so it is not surprising that every single environmental or public health law challenged at WTO has been ruled illegal.

WTO tribunals, documents, hearings and briefs are secret. Only national governments are allowed to participate, even if a state law is being challenged.

Losing countries have only three choices: change their law as the WTO demands, pay "compensation" to the winning country, or face sanctions.

If a democractic government decides to do something, the WTO can force it not to, no matter what voters decide.

Lori Wallach and Michelle Sforza, in their new book The WTO: Five Years of Reasons to Resist Corporate Globalization, point out that large corporations are essentially "renting" governments to bring cases before the WTO, and in this way, to win battles they have lost in public opinion at home.

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Truth outlawed

The WTO considers supermarket labels, like ones pointing out products that are not genetically modified, are a "trade barrier". In short, they believe that ignorence is good and the truth is a "trade barrier".

Health a trade barrier

The daddy of the WTO, GATT, co-operated with Reagan when he threatened sanctions against Asian nations that opposed smoking. When the Bush Administration declared the War on Drugs, they took the time to threaten sanctions on Thialand for rejecting US tobacco pushers. In China alone, Phillip Morris alone, in 1992 alone spent $9,000,000,000 on propaganda. One must wonder if their cigarettes are advertised as a "great leap forward".

After scientific reports of health risk from hormone injected beef, the European Union followed the will of the people and banned it. The WTO tried to overturn this democratic decision.

Japan tried to prohibit pesticide-laden apples. The WTO wanted them to eat more poison.

Environmental protection outlawed

Oil: The US tried to pass laws forcing petrol to be cleaner - until the WTO decided that the law was a "trade barrier" to producers of filthy oil. Instead of finding better ways to produce cleaner oil, industries simply have the WTO over-rule democracy.

When the US tried to save sea turtles and force cleaner, better ways of catching shrimp, the WTO decided that turtles were a trade barrier.

Attempts to help the poor "unfair"

When the EU decided to help impoverished Caribbean banana farmers, US multinational corporations, with massive plantations in Latin America, whined that doing business with the poor was "unfair". The WTO agreed.

Democratic government policy undermined

When the democraticly-elected Government of India tried to restrict imports - just like America and others did so that they could develop - the WTO over-ruled the voters.

But then, democracy is not worth much to neos. Philippe Legrain, a former World Trade Organisation official, says that "Sixty million Britons would not accept 1,300m Chinese outvoting them."

Dictatorships supported

When the voters of Massachusetts' tried to penalise companies doing business with the brutal dictators of Burma, the WTO sided with the dictators - or would have, except that a corporate lobby group sued Massechusetts first. "If we had rulings like this in the 70s and 80s, the United States would not have been able to participate in the anti-Apartied movement" said Massachusetts State Representative Byron Rushing "I am glad these judges werent around then or (Nelson) Mandela might still be in jail."

Exceptions for violence

GATT article 21 allows protection of "traffic in arms, ammunition and impliments of war". In 1999, the WTO ruled against Canadian subsidies on civilian passenger jets. The program was changed to a subsidy for building weapons.

When the USA decided that healthy Cubans were "detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests," the Clinton Administration passed the "Cuban Democracy Act" (Even though Neos claim that democracy is impossible without development), cutting off affordable medicines. The American Association of World Health pointed out "a devastating outbreak of neuropathy" and "excruciating pain" for children, which only got worse as more sanctions were put in place by the free traders.

When the European Union challenged the Helms-Burton Act, the most obvious case of a "trade barrier" if there ever was one, at the WTO, Clinton suddenly sided against the WTO. He then blamed Cubans for being ungrateful for all of the children he had tortured for them. (Noam Chonksy http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/chomud.htm)

And as for actual trade...

American Textile Manufacturers Institute says that the WTO is a "costly failure" and that export markets for US textile and apparel products remain as closed or, in some cases, more tightly shut than they were in 1994. In short, the WTO has been so busy hunting turtles it forgot about trade.

The alternative is obvious:

When the EU halted sales of frozen fish from Uganda, instead whining to the WTO, the Ugandans simply built better, more modern cleaning facilities. The ban was lifted.

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The WTO is based in Geneva, one of the world's most expensive cities.

The US has over 250 negotiators while 30 poor nations have 0 - they cannot afford it! Interestingly, rich neos do not consider wining and dining rich neos as much of a waste of tax money as, say, education.

"The scope of the WTO multilateral obligations, the technical complexity, the volume of issues covered and the administrative burden have placed most developing countries in a situation where their participation in the system is almost beyond their means," Kenya's trade minister Nicholas Biwott told Nairobi's The Nation.

In the end, WTO rules are enforced with sanctions. The US has little to fear if a small Third World country threatens sanctions, but the US could destroy the same third world country if the situation is reversed.

Developing countries are three-quarters of the WTO membership but have made only one-fifth of the complaints to the dispute panel. The US has filed nearly 30% of all cases, and won 90% of them.

WTO decisions are made by unelected, unaccountable committees heavily bribed by corporations.

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In the WTO and other neo institutions the most important debates and decisions take place in secret. For democracy to work people need to know how their fate is being decided.

Ministers of the richest countries met secretly at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris in 1997 and tried to hammer out a bill of rights for international investors, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).

After two years of secretive conspiring, NGOs found out, protests began, and the aggreement was cancelled. The makers of the MIA then turned to the World Trade Organization to replace the MIA with Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMs).

Both the MAI and TRIMs would force taxpayers to pay corporations that see lower profits as a result of democracy. (Chapter 11 of NAFTA does the same thing).

Also, governments would be forced to tax, regulate, and subsidize foreign businesses exactly as they do local businesses. This means that the industrial development strategies done by the United States and Germany in the 19th century to Japan and Korea in the 20th would be ruled out. In short, development would be outlawed. Another goal is the end of capital controls.

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In the past most governments controlled the buying and selling of their currencies for purposes other than trade. This meant investments could not instantly move to other nations on a whim.

But since the 1980s, the IMF and the U.S. Treasury have pressured governments to lift these controls. Now corporations and wealthy individuals can threaten to pull liquid capital out of any country whose policies displease them. A nation that increases its minimum wage, for example, can be instantly punished.

While other Asian nations listened to the IMF and lifted their controls, Malaysia successfully imposed controls during the Asian economic crisis. In January 2001 the IMF finally admitted that capital controls had worked - but are still bad.

The ISO is completely industry-run and does not even pretend to have public involvement. This is fine, because the ISO only deals with standardizing odds and ends like the size of screws or credit cards worldwide.

However, the ISO is creating "a strategic partnership" with the WTO and has begun setting environmental standards, including the process used for producing organic agricultural products. In the future the ISO might grow and gain more power.

"From an environmental perspective, the ISO isn’t ideal because it’s captured by industry," says trade lawyer Stephen Porter of the Washington, D.C. Center for International and Environmental law. "The part that’s most troublesome is when an ISO standard becomes a default standard under the WTO rules," says Porter. "Does it become impossible to go beyond that in a practical matter if Austria wants to set an environmental standard that is 130% of the ISO standard?" And once ISO standards become part of the WTO, what was a voluntary system receives the force of law, without public involvement.

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