WTO TURNAROUND - Stop WTO Expansion
CALL TO ACTION!
Through its 15 years of existence, the WTO has set the rules for global trade in favor of
corporate profit and power, wreaking havoc on workers, farmers, the environment, and
threatening sovereignty of countries around the world. The agenda of the negotiations to expand
the WTO (called the Doha Round) were inappropriate when they were launched in 2001, but
they are completely the wrong agenda in the context of the impacts of the current global crises.
The onset of the global agricultural, economic, and financial crises have thrown into bright relief
how the WTO fails to promote global economic stability, development, or poverty reduction...
MEDIA RELEASE: International Call for G-20 Action on WTO Financial Deregulation, April 14, 2011
MEDIA RELEASE: Another Doha Round Deadline Failure: Why Yesterday's Solution to Yesterday's Agenda is No Longer In Demand in Today's Global Economy, April 21, 2011
Japan's WTO complaint against Canada could expose corporate attack on green jobs,
Stuart Trew, rabble news, September 27, 2010
The conflict between environmental policy and the current international trade regime has been long, controversial, and inconclusive. As the world comes to terms with the severity of the climate crisis and its causes in human economic activity, questions about whether climate change mitigation strategies are legal or not under World Trade Organization and other trade rules are more pressing than ever. Read more »
Letter to Ambassador Gero re: WTO and financial regulation, The Council of Canadians, March 16, 2010
While countries around the world are reeling from the recent financial crisis, the WTO continues to promote a pre‐crisis agenda, particularly on financial services, ignoring that one of the main causes of this crisis was overreaching financial deregulation. Canada’s unique banking regulations may have cushioned the impact here at home, but current Doha Round proposals would undermine even these Canadian policies and any future attempts to re‐regulate the financial services sector. In our letter, we urge the Canadian delegation to the WTO to lend its support to those countries demanding an analysis of the connection between existing WTO financial services rules and the international financial crisis, as well as a freeze on additional financial deregulation talks within the Doha Round. Read more »
Response from Ambassador Gero on Canada’s position on financial services talks at the WTO, April 29, 2010
Civil Society Open Letter to WTO Director General Pascal Lamy: The impact of trade liberalization on the realization of human rights
A response by 10 international organizations to Pascal Lamy’s statements during a January 11-13, 2010 Colloquium on Human Rights in the Global Economy, co-organized by the International Council on Human Rights and Realizing Rights in Geneva. The groups explain clearly where the WTO has failed to consider human rights and development in its rulemaking and decision making. “From a human rights and development perspective, even in the highly hypothetical situation where adequate social protection systems were in place, it does not always follow that trade liberalization will be ‘successful,’ as your ‘Geneva consensus’ suggests,” states the letter, which calls for “a much more forceful and meaningful approach to ‘policy space’ for developing countries to make sure trade obligations do not contravene their right to development and do not inhibit their capacity to fulfil their human rights obligations.” Read more »
Council of Canadians vice-chair Leo Broderick and trade campaigner Stuart Trew were in Geneva participating in counter-ministerial events and raising concerns about the impacts of the WTO agenda from November 30 to December 2, 2009. Read more »
The Council of Canadians endorses the Our World is Not For Sale (OWINFS) network’s call to “unite and confront the converging global crises of our times, replace the trade and investment pacts and related juggernauts of the corporate-driven global economy, and start building a sustainable economic future together.”
The OWINFS network, to which the Council of Canadians is a member, is a loose grouping of organizations, activists and social movements worldwide fighting the current model of corporate globalization embodied in the global trading system. OWINFS is committed to a sustainable, socially just, democratic and accountable multilateral trading system.
In late November 2009, another World Trade Organization ministerial meeting was held to once again try to kick-start stalled global trade talks whose successful conclusion would only perpetuate a failed global economic regime and put unnecessary limits on government action to protect jobs, the environment, food security, culture and democratic governance. Several days later, world leaders met in Copenhagen for a UN Climate Summit to consider trade impacts of serious climate change action.
“To overcome the current global and systemic crises that now engulf the planet, we must collectively call for the building of a new economic order -- one that puts the satisfaction of basic human needs and the implementation of all social, economic, cultural, political and human rights at the centre of its program priorities -- and one that is based on models of production and consumption that respect the natural resource limits of the planet, an equitable distribution of these resources among people, and the use of clean, safe and renewable energy resources,” says the OWINFS statement.
OWINFS calls on social movements, labour unions and civil society organizations around the world to work together in the coming months to resist and replace the neoliberal trade and globalization regime that is causing and intensifying the global crises:
- by organizing actions and mobilizing our members to prevent the conclusion of the Doha Round of the WTO before and after its ministerial meeting in Geneva;
- by promoting and establishing a moratorium on bilateral and bi-regional free trade negotiations in particular countries and regions;
- by taking action to ensure that the WTO and its neoliberal model of trade are delegitimized as false solutions leading up to the Climate Summit in Copenhagen.
Read the full Global Turn Around statement here.
Read the OWINFS Statement of Political Unity here.
To sign the OWINFS Global Turn Around statement, click here.
OWINFS statement: Abandon Doha - Confront the Crisis (PDF)
Resources
WTO Ministerial Meetings:
Unlike the World Trade Organization, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is an entity still in the process of being created.
Although negotiations are currently stalled, the new FTAA would be a hemispheric-wide free trade zone covering 34 countries in North America, Central America, South America and the Caribbean, minus Cuba.
Touted to be the largest free trade zone in the world, the FTAA would encompass a population of over 800 million people and a combined annual gross national product of U.S. $11 trillion.
The FTAA gained prominence in the public eye during the demonstrations against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, where thousands of people raised their voices in the midst of teargas and police repression, to demand that democracy come before trade and that governments place the rights of people before the desire of corporations to make a profit.
For more information about the FTAA , click here.
