MEDIA RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 10 , 2003

NGO’s peacefully disrupt WTO Ministerial Opening Ceremony to denounce illegitimacy of corporate-backed organization

CANCUN, MEXICO – Delegates from more than 20 NGO’s peacefully protested today during the opening plenary of the World Trade Organization 5th Ministerial Meeting in Cancun, to denounce the undemocratic, anti-development and obsolete agenda of the WTO.

Waldon Bello, economist and director of the Philippines-based Focus on the Global South, condemns the anti-development agenda of the WTO. While the WTO organization claims to be the panacea for the developing countries, it acts in an entirely different way. “The free trade biases that the WTO promotes are really mechanisms that allow corporate monopolies to pry open and monopolize developing country markets by suppressing efforts at national development,” says Mr. Bello. “Membership in the WTO makes it impossible for developing countries to use control of their external trade via tariffs and quotas as part of a strategy of development.”

Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, condemns on her side the undemocratic aspects of the WTO, rendering it illegitimate: “Through the use of non-transparent decision-making mechanisms, the WTO has shown itself to be in violation of the basic rules of democracy. In the WTO, parliamentary institutions are reserved for speech-making while real decisions are made in informal, restricted ‘green-room’ and ‘mini-ministerials’ whose participants are handpicked by a few powerful governments, including Canada.”

To the NGO’s, the WTO is an obsolete organization. By putting profits before people, by putting the bottom line before human rights, democracy and environmental equilibrium, the WTO has outlived its usefulness: it is time to move forward and to look for a different structure that would advance economic principles that put people and the environment before the needs of multinationals.

The NGO delegates were escorted by security personnel outside of the Auditorium, but they pledge to continue the fight to have their voices heard in Cancun.

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