Home > What is the WTO?
The following is basically an extract/resume of the following articles:
- Fiona Hunt. 2001. "The WTO and the Threat to Libraries." Information for Social Change No. 14.
- Maude Barlow. 2001. "A GATS Primer."
What is the WTO?
The World Trade Organization was established in 1995 to regulate global trade. The WTO became more widely known in 1999 during its Millenium Round meeting in Seattle where thousands of protestors took to the streets to try and shut it down.
Unlike any other global institution, the WTO has the legislative and judicial power to challenge the laws, practices and policies of individual countries and strike them down if they are seen to be too trade restrictive. It strives to abolish the public sector and encourages privatization and deregulation. The WTO contains no minimum standards to protect labour, human rights, social or environmental standards; every single time the WTO has been used to challenge a domestic health, food safety, fair trade or environmental law, the WTO has won. Over the last eight years, the operations of the WTO show that it has become the most powerful, secretive, and anti-democratic body on earth, rapidly assuming the mantle of a global government and actively seeking to broaden its powers and reach.
National Treatment
The WTO has a built in policy in the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) called National Treatment. National Treatment is the right of foreign companies to be treated the same as or better than domestic companies. This rule states that a business can compete against publicly funded institutions for public funds.
What is GATS?
The GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) is one of many WTO agreements. Its goal is to deregulate services world-wide and to commit each country to deregulate their service sectors and provide national treatment for foreign-service based companies. Services include, among others, health care, broadcasting, water treatment, education, museums, LIBRARIES, and ARCHIVES. Services is the fastest growing sector in international trade, and of all services, health, education, and water are shaping up to be the most potentially lucrative of all. Global expenditures on water services now exceed 1$ trillion; and on health care, expenditures exceed 3.5$ trillion. These and other services have been targeted by powerful transnational corporations who are aiming at the complete dismantling of public services by subjecting them to the rules of international competition and the discipline of the WTO
Effect of the WTO/GATS on libraries
Please see the section "Why oppose the WTO?" to find out how the WTO/GATS could affect our publicly funded libraries