Report on the evening session of the September 12 teach-in with various speakers targeting and critiquing the World Trade Organization (WTO) in connection with the WTO's meeting in Cancún, Mexico and the protests in Cancún and on the San Diego-Tijuana border September 13.
Copyright – 2003 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine – Used by permission
"In the beginning was the Great Depression," speaker Raj Patel explained at the start of a September 12 evening teach-in on the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other international institutions that are part of the corporate-driven globalization movement. The event was held in connection with the WTO's current ministerial meeting in Cancún, Mexico and protests against the WTO scheduled both for Cancún itself and the U.S.-Mexico border September 13.
Patel said that the international economic collapse of the 1930's was frequently blamed on the high protective tariffs passed by the U.S. and other industrial nations against each other's products — and that after World War II, when the victors met to plan the world's economic future, they decided to avoid that by setting up international organizations devoted to reducing trade and tariff barriers between countries.
"Initially an International Trade Organization (ITO) was suggested, consisting of equal representation of corporations, governments and labor," Patel explained. "This exploded on the launch pad in 1946 because the U.S. government was scared of having labor represented and the Congress refused to participate. Instead, in 1947 they came up with the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), at first between the great powers and then, as it lurched forward in a series of 'rounds' newly independent former colonies joined. Over the next 40 years the prices of imported goods were haggled down through GATT."
The process by which the relatively benign GATT was transformed into the oppressive WTO took about 10 years, Patel explained. It started in 1984 in Uruguay, during the so-called "Uruguay Round" of GATT negotiations. "The U.S. wanted a way to continue controlling developing countries without bombing and recolonizing them," Patel said. In transforming GATT into the WTO the U.S. and other developed countries pushed through two major changes, according to Patel.
First, they gave the WTO an enforcement mechanism, including secret tribunals that can strike down government regulations as "non-tariff barriers on trade" and order the countries that passed them either to get rid of them or face economic sanctions. Second, they included agriculture within the bounds of the WTO. "For developing countries, whose most important source of income is farming, that's the most pernicious aspect of the WTO," Patel explained.
The WTO was formally launched in 1994 at an official signing ceremony in Marrakech, Morocco — but the agreement on agriculture still wasn't finished and was in fact slated to be completed at the current WTO ministerial meeting in Cancún, Mexico. In the meantime, however, starting in 1995 advanced countries began "dumping" agricultural products in developing countries — selling them for less than it cost to make them — in order to destroy the farm-based economies of the Third World and force them to depend on advanced countries and their multinational agribusiness corporations for food, Patel said.
"The U.S. and other rich countries subsidize their farming to a total of $1 billion per day," Patel explained. "Vast amounts of money go to giant corporations to produce food. The poorest people in the world are farmers. They make their money growing food, and if you sell food for less than it costs to produce, it displaces them off the land and destroys their economy." According to Patel, some of these displaced farmers flee to the cities of their own countries in a desperate search for work; some of them end up working for the large multinational corporations that displaced them, paid subsistence or below-subsistence wages to farm the land they once owned; and some of them emigrate to advanced countries, like the so-called "illegal" immigrants that routinely cross the border from Mexico to the U.S.
And if that weren't enough of a curse for developing countries, Patel added, they're under even more pressure from the WTO and other international agencies — particularly the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which impose so-called "structural adjustment programs" (SAP's) on developing countries with major debt burdens — to privatize their basic resources, especially water. "The WTO wants to turn the things we depend on for life — water, food, land, health care — into commodities," Patel explained.
Patel called on WTO opponents to step up their direct action campaigns against it. He cited an international network of agricultural organizations called Via Campesina, with affiliates in Brazil, India and many other Third World countries, as an example. "The people are dying, and they're at such a level of desperation that they're willing to respond," he said. "Via Campesina has called for getting the WTO out of agriculture as well as intellectual property and the trade in services."
A woman identified only as Sprague, from the Earth First! Journalism Collective, discussed the way the WTO threatens the environment. She said that every time a country's environmental regulations have been challenged as a "non-tariff barrier to trade" by a multinational corporation or another country under the WTO's enforcement mechanisms, the WTO has found against the regulation and ordered countries to weaken their environmental law or face economic sanctions and fines. Sprague called this "a reign of exploitation on all things wild and wonderful."
Later, in answer to an audience question, Patel explained just how the WTO's enforcement system worked. "There's a Dispute Settlement Body of pseudo-law, where the two parties come before a panel of three judges who meet in secret," he said. "Often they come from backgrounds in industry, and they hear the case in secret and hand down a verdict and a sentence. They are judge, jury and executioner."
Sprague called on people living in San Diego, Tucson and other major cities on the U.S.-Mexico border to campaign against the militarization of the border in general and the triple border fence, now under construction, in particular. "It's definitely an issue of human rights, environmentalism and imperialism," Sprague explained. "It's not only going to threaten human life, it also threatens huge expanses of ecosystems and the Tijuana estuary. I would urge all of you to coalesce around this issue."
John Iversen of the Health Gap Global Access Project discussed the struggle between developing countries anxious to obtain state-of-the-art prescription drugs and the giant multinational pharmaceutical companies who are blocking them. Iversen said the drug companies — "Big Pharma," as they are often referred to collectively by activists — have the largest profit margins in the world, an average of 20 percent rate of return on investment (ROI). That's three times the average rate of profit for American corporations generally, he said.
"Last year, the pharmaceutical industry's total profit was $30 billion," Iversen said. "The two largest companies, Merck and Glaxo, each earned $7 billion in profit, more than all the world's oil companies combined." What's more, he added, the profitability of Big Pharma comes almost exclusively from prescription drugs, which earn an average 40 percent ROI compared to just 5 percent from the over-the-counter medications they also sell.
According to Iversen, the WTO protects Big Pharma through a set of agreements called TRIPS — Trade-Related Intellectual Property and Services. TRIPS also covers the entertainment business, but as Iversen put it, "The difference is that Michael Jackson or Paul McCartney don't get government subsidies to write songs." By contrast — despite the drug industry's assertions that they need high prices and stiff patent protection on their products to protect and fund "research" — most drug research in the U.S. and other developed countries is actually funded by taxpayers.
Iversen said that on one important product — Acyclovir, the anti-herpes drug that was considered the world's first successful antiviral medication — the U.S. government covered 95 percent of the cost of researching the drug and then gave the patent away to Glaxo, which paid only 5 percent of the research cost. He also said that most U.S. pharmaceutical research that isn't paid for by taxpayers is funded by "independent biotech companies" who develop new drugs and then find themselves forced to sell the rights to giant drug companies to get their products approved and marketed at all. "The drug companies spend 6 percent of their budgets on research and 18 percent on marketing," Iversen said.
"AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria have really pushed the envelope for the pharmaceutical companies," Iversen added. He told the story of the South African government's struggle to institute a so-called "compulsory licensing" program for the anti-cancer drug Tamoxifen (actually "poached" by a major drug company from herbal remedies used for centuries in South America), under which a South African company could have produced it at far less than it would have cost to buy it from the patent holder.
This law, passed in 1998, drew a lawsuit from 39 pharmaceutical companies worldwide who correctly saw it as a threat to the international recognition of patents, which give individual companies monopolies on certain drugs and therefore push prices way up, Iversen explained. The litigation dragged on for three years and sparked demonstrations in the South African city of Pretoria — which drew 15,000 people to an action on the day the South African Parliament opened in 2001 — as well as 29 other cities in 15 countries. (Iversen himself recalled getting arrested at the support demonstration in Berkeley.) Eventually the drug companies realized what a bad P.R. move this was and settled one month later — but at a price; the South African government was forced to sign on to the TRIPS agreement as part of the settlement.
In 2001 the WTO had its first ministerial meeting since the one in Seattle in 1999 — and at this meeting, held in an isolated spot in the Arab oil state of Qatar, "the pharmaceutical companies continued to back down," Iversen recalled. The WTO considered a rule that said "public-health emergencies shall supersede property rights", but the American delegation got the "shall" changed to "should" — which, said Iversen, "kept it from being legally binding
According to Iversen, the U.S. was the one vote among all 141 WTO member nations opposed to allowing countries access to drugs in "medical emergencies" — but according to the WTO's consensus decision-making process, that was enough to block it. More recently, Iversen said, the WTO has created a policy that supposedly grants manufacturers of generic drugs in developing countries like Brazil and China the right to make patent-protected drugs — but only after they clear a lot of bureaucratic hurdles, including getting two licenses instead of just one and proving that they are not making the drugs to make a profit.
After a dinner break, the teach-in resumed with a new set of speakers: a man named Jeremy from the International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local 389; a woman named Paulina (who had MC'd the first part of the event) who discussed issues in Mexico; and a woman named Traci, from Public Citizen, who discussed food irradiation. According to Traci, food irradiation — "exposing food to ionizing radiation that can break down molecules" — was first experimented with 50 years ago and started to catch on in the 1980's, but now multinational agriculture companies are seizing on it as a way to promote globalization of the world's food supply under their control.
While opposition to food irradiation in the 1980's and 1990's focused mainly on the health risks (particularly the possibility that the ionizing radiation could split the molecules in food and form toxic chemicals known as free radicals), Traci said today's irradiation opponents are also stressing the economic and environmental impacts. Like genetic engineering, food irradiation is a technology that allows corporations to control the world's food supply by killing invasive insects and thereby shipping their products all over the world.
Irradiated food also has a longer shelf life and can therefore be transported for long distances without spoiling. "It opens the markets corporations have," Traci explained. "They can grow food in countries with the cheapest labor and least environmental regulations, and ship it all over the world."
Paulina explained the history of Mexico since the 1910-1917 revolution and noted how the limited gains made under the revolution have been undone during the last 20 years, especially since Mexico joined GATT in 1987 and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in 1994. The land reforms the Mexican revolutionaries fought for were reversed and American companies were allowed to "dump" cheap food products, thus smashing the agricultural base of the Mexican economy. "Because of this, many farmers have been emigrating to the cities or to the North," Paulina said.
Paulina cited corn, Mexico's most important crop, as one which the agribusiness and biotech industries have particularly targeted. "Mexico is the Mecca of corn," she said. "It is our national patrimony. Our way of living is being destroyed by 'dumping' and by the U.S. subsidies for genetically modified 'yellow corn' to feed animals. Our 180 varieties of corn are being destroyed by cross-pollination." She said that corn costs $2.66 per bushel to produce and sells in the world market for $1.74 per bushel. "The difference is in the subsidies," she said. "There is no way the Mexican farmers can compete with that."
Jeremy's presentation was mostly an attack on the leadership of the U.S. labor movement for allying itself with the bosses instead of rank-and-file workers and dropping out of the mass movement against globalization in general and the WTO in particular. "In 1999 there were 15,000 union members in Seattle," he recalled. "We've watched the labor movement gradually drop away from this movement, until this year not a single local union has endorsed this action."
According to Jeremy, the unions' impotence in the face of globalization is due to their leadership sharing a common class interest with the managers of corporations that are supposedly their adversaries. "The people who run unions make six figures, live in the same neighborhoods as the bosses, send their kids to the same schools and think like the bosses," he said. "They have everything to lose from an all-out battle between the bosses and the workers."
Among the targets of Jeremy's criticisms were unions like the Teamsters and the Steelworkers, whose responses to the threats globalization poses to their members' jobs is to seek protectionist measures that just pit American workers against workers in other countries. The Teamsters sought a ban on "unsafe" Mexican trucks entering the U.S. under NAFTA instead of working cross-border with Mexican truckers to improve the safety of all trucks, and the Steelworkers likewise agitated for legislation to block imports of foreign steel.
"The unions have a lot to learn from young activists in the anti-globalization movement," Jeremy said. "The union movement in this country started as a direct action movement. In 1999 the Seattle unions rented a stadium and did a six-hour rally, and it was so boring the younger members left for the direct actions — and the leaders ran out in front of the actions, trying to scare them away. That was the last time you saw rank-and-file workers anywhere near actions like Seattle because the more rank-and-file workers associate with radical youth, the more that threatens the labor bureaucrats."
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