The next World Trade Organization negotiations will be the last best chance for industrialized countries to set rules favourable to their powerful biotechnology corporate interests, says Canada’s highest profile anti-free trade activist.
Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, says her group and its allies around the world will spend the summer trying to abort the launch of WTO negotiations when trade ministers meet in the Middle East city of Doha, Qatar Nov. 9.
If talks are launched, the activists will work hard to influence the negotiations by pressuring governments.
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“We’re pulling out all the stops,” she said in an interview in the council’s Ottawa offices.
“We don’t want American fast track legislation. We don’t want Doha to become a full-fledged trade launch. We are gearing up for a huge fight. It is a struggle for the hearts and minds of the people of the world and the powerful interests are trying to get their favourable rules in place as soon as possible because they can see how quickly we are catching up.”
At issue, she said, will be an attempt by trading powers such as the United States, the European Union and Canada to ensure the rules allow trade in genetically modified commodities and prohibit poorer countries from using barriers to stop products they are not sure are safe.
Opponents of genetic engineering will not be able to hold street demonstrations in Qatar, which is ruled by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani.
“We’re going to have to tell our governments all over the world that they should not dare go there and negotiate away our food safety,” said Barlow, once a Liberal and adviser to prime minister Pierre Trudeau who has become an avid opponent of free trade and corporate power.
“They should not create rules that force GE foods on countries that don’t want them.”
Her allies, including the National Farmers Union, environmental, health and consumer groups, will be trying to “stick a monkey wrench into the gears” of the free trade and globalization machine, she said.
This summer health, environmental, social and anti-free trade activists around the world are gearing up for the WTO campaign. They are using formal and informal networks, the internet and mass organizing to try to replicate a successful late 1990s campaign to derail a proposed international agreement to protect investor rights.
They also are counting on what they believe is falling public support for trade rules that are perceived as bills of rights for business.
“There’s no doubt something is happening here in public mood and governments know it so they are trying to get the rules they want in quickly,” said Barlow. “Those rules will cement their power.”
The first line of attack will be to try to convince the U.S. Congress not to pass “fast track” legislation, giving the American administration the power to negotiate an international deal and then to present it to Congress as a take-it-or-leave-it package. Without fast track, Congress could reject parts of any WTO package and effectively kill the deal.
Last week, the largest U.S. farm lobby urged Congress to pass fast track authority as “a necessary ingredient” for a successful launch.
“A new trade round is critical for U.S. agriculture,” American Farm Bureau president Bob Stallman said in a July 25 statement issued in Washington. “It remains the only means available for our sector to gain commercially meaningful reform in global trade.”
For Barlow and her allies, that kind of view from the biotechnology-promoting American agriculture sector signals the need to fight.
Southern and developing countries have been signaling that if they do not win concessions from industrialized countries to buy more of their agricultural commodities, they will not sign a new WTO agreement.
“There will be a huge confrontation,” she said. “The whole thing hinges on whether Europe and the United States are willing to reduce their subsidies and their protectionism. If they don’t get what they want from Europe and the U.S., they will break the round.”
And that would not break her heart.
