Representatives of people's movements from all over the world and of the refugees and migrants living in Germany will hold a joint hunger strike during the World Economic Summit in solidarity with all those who suffer hunger, oppression, misery and death due to the destructive policies imposed by the governments of Western industrial countries.
Over the last decades, trade liberalisation policies adopted by almost all governments of the world (often forced by institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) have led to devastating problems all over the world. The dependency on the global market that these policies have exacerbated, which is also increasingly affecting Northern countries, implies that local and national policies are determined to an increasing extent by the single objective of international competitiveness, at the expense of equality, human rights, social and environmental policies, labour conditions, etc. Today, the combined incomes of 358 billionaires exceed the combined incomes of 2,3 billion people, 45% of the world's population. The neoliberal policies behind this development have been codified as international law in the Uruguay Round of the GATT, which also created the World Trade Organisation (WTO) with the mission of enforcing these rules, punishing countries that decide to follow different policies and provide a permanent negotiation forum to continue developing this system of global domination. This system of global governance is dominated by the G7, a club formed by the governments of the seven most industrialised countries of the world, which is now meeting in Cologne (along with the president of Russia).
In November 1999 the WTO will hold its Third Ministerial Conference in Seattle. This conference is likely to launch a new round of negotiations which will expand even further the scope of the WTO system. The new round is expected to result, among other things, in more trade liberalisation in agricultural products (which has already taken a heavy death toll in India and other countries in the form of suicides of hundreds of complete families of farmers), more possibilities for TNCs to obtain patent rights over life forms, and the granting of unprecedented rights to foreign TNCs all over the world, through the incorporation of all the contents of the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) into the WTO. The Gang of Seven will decide the agenda of these negotiations.
This crazy New World Order is maintained by national and global systems of repression that are intensifying the oppression on social activists, many of whom don't have any other choice than leaving their home countries in order to save their lives. It is also destroying the livelihoods of billions of people all over the world, who are forced to leave their places and go where the wealth stolen from them is being concentrated - the metropoles of their countries and the rich industrial nations where the global flows of stolen capital converge. The response of the rich countries to this disarray is simple: criminalising and prosecuting those whose lives have been dislocated by global capitalism.
With this hunger strike we express our solidarity with all the wretched of the world, from the South, North, East and West, those who had to flee and those who are suffering misery and repression in their own countries. We call on all people of the world to resist the New World Order and its instruments, such as the regime of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). We encourage people to organise and construct alternatives from below - not asking those responsible for the miseries of the world to repair them, but taking control over our own lives and shaping a new world free of exploitation and oppression, a world guided by justice and self-determination.