6th
September, 2003
WTO rules set to devastate
biodiversity
As hundreds of small farmers, indigenous people’s groups
and landless peasants start preparations to descend on Cancun
to protest the Fifth Ministerial meeting of the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) scheduled to take place September 10-14,
Friends of the Earth added its voice to the protests against
the WTO and its new rules that promise a devastating impact
on the world’s biological and cultural diversity.
The WTO draft agreements on areas like agriculture, services
and intellectual property rights will lead to increased deforestation
and the replacement of traditional agricultural crops, seeds
and livestock by large-scale monocultures, including those based
on genetically modified (GM) crops. [1]
The most devastating impacts would come from agricultural trade
agreements, especially if they would be based upon the recent
US-European Union joint proposal for the modalities of agricultural
negotiations. This proposal sets the scene for drastic market
liberalization in agricultural products, while it leaves virtually
untouched the massive direct and indirect subsidies these trading
blocks are providing to their own export-oriented farmers (with
the exception of a limited category of direct export subsidies).
The result will be devastating for small farmers in developing
countries, who will be unable to compete with subsidized large-scale
producers in industrialized countries. These small-farmers are
the main custodians of the world’s agrobiodiversity, which
consists of thousands of plant and animal varieties and related
traditional knowledge. When these farmers disappear, this wealth
of biological and cultural diversity disappears too.
“The large-scale, export-oriented agriculture that is promoted
in current WTO proposals is also the main cause of deforestation,
especially in tropical areas,” said Simone Lovera of Friends
of the Earth International.
“It is now widely recognized that the recent increase of
deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon is mainly caused by the
rapid expansion of soy bean production for the – mainly
European – export market,” Lovera added.
The traditional knowledge of small farmers and Indigenous Peoples
relating to the use and conservation of biodiversity is also
being threatened by the growing practice of so-called “biopiracy”,
the practice of Northern biotechnology industries to patent
seeds, traditional knowledge and other elements of biological
and cultural diversity of the South.
Developing countries have demanded a review of the WTO’s
Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs)
agreement to protect themselves against such biopiracy. As part
of these negotiations, African countries have called for a prohibition
of patenting of life forms.
The WTO meeting follows hard on the gathering of twenty Heads
of State and over 110 Ministers held this week in Havana, Cuba,
to discuss the problem of desertification, a process to which
WTO policies are contributing. Desertification and land degradation are global
environmental problems that devastate the livelihoods of millions
of rural people, especially small-scale farmers. It is estimated
by the Secretariat of the Desertification Convention that the
degradation of land is costing the world community up to 40
billion USD per year. Yet, official development aid to rural
communities, where the majority of the world's poor lives, has
been
declining over the past decade. Meanwhile, droughts and other
climatic extremes caused by climate change are taking a particularly
heavy toll on dryland populations.
Agricultural trade liberalization as currently proposed by the
US and European Union (EU) at the WTO will place an additional
burden on dryland populations. Most dryland communities consist
of small farmers who are unable to compete on a world market.
Even the local markets of these small producers are nowadays
rapidly being taken over by subsidized agricultural products
from the EU, the US and other industrialized countries. The
trade proposals by the EU and US leave their direct and indirect
support structures for export-oriented agriculture virtually
untouched, while they would force developing countries to open
up their agricultural markets for these subsidized products.
The results would be devastating for dryland producers and for
the lands these communities manage.
Water privatisation triggered by the General Agreement in Trade
in Services under the WTO will put an additional burden on dryland
populations. Water is a very precious common good in many arid
zones, and few rural farming and pastoralist communities are
able to pay for privatized water services. Water privatisation
schemes have already lead to disastrous effects in countries
like Niger and Northern Mali, where rural people living in deserts
and drylands have been faced with water bills that are taking
up between 12 and 70% of their income.
The official United Nations website of 'the sixth Conference
of the Parties to Combat desertification' is here
For more information on Cancún go to
http://www.foei.org/cancun
Left MEPs go to Cancún
A delegation of 8 MEPs from the United Left Group (GUE/NGL)
in the European Parliament will go this Sunday (7th September)
to Cancún (Mexico) to make heard their call for an in-depth
reform to the international trading system, so that priority
is given to social justice, the right to development, food safety,
public health, education, environmental protection and cultural
diversity rather than to purely commercial and financial considerations.
A spokesperson for the Group said that "the GUE/NGL
is against any extension of the scope of activities of the WTO.
We seek a proper public debate and think that the mandate of
the European Commission, which dates from before Seattle, is
obsolete and must be updated to take account of the serious
problems which have come to light since then, particularly in
the field of access to drugs and services, and in agriculture.
The delegation will defend its opinions in various fora,
and will take part in several events, a priority being the meeting
of the World Parliamentary Forum on 8 September, for which the
Group is co-organiser. Set up within the framework of the World
Social Forum at Porto Alegre, this Parliamentary Forum brings
together MPs from all over the world who oppose neo-liberalism
and seek to build alternatives.
During the Forum, a declaration on their priorities
for the Cancún talks signed by many Parliamentarians from several
countries will be finalised and sent to the WTO and to the government
delegations taking part in the negotiations.
For more information
on the Parliamentary Forum go here
For more on the GUE-NGL go to http://eicippohttp/guengl/
.
New radio launched to
break the mainstream media reporting monopoly on the WTO
real world radio is an initiative that mixes radio and new internet
tools to enable communication between the diverse array of individuals,
groups and social organizations trying to break through the
information ‘wall’ set up by the mainstream media
reporting on the WTO.
A joint initiative of Friends of the Earth International (www.foei.org)
and Asociación Mundial de Radios Comunitarias (www.amarc.org),
the radio station's aim is to show the impact of
trade liberalisation, and, at the same time, to show there are
thousands of ways for communities to resist transnational corporations.
In Cancún real world radio will cover the official agenda of
the WTO negotiations and, in addition, will focus on the wide
variety of civil society mobilizations in the first fifteen
days of September. This programming will be available in Spanish,
Portugese and English, the latter at here
Mercosur for sale? The
EU's FTAA and the need to oppose it
"As if the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is not bad enough,
the number of equally corporate-biased bilateral and inter-regional
free trade negotiations has mushroomed in recent years. Talks
between the European Union (EU) and the South American trade
bloc Mercosur, for instance, have now entered their decisive
stage. Against the background of intense competition with the
US over economic dominance in the region, the EU's main goal
is to secure markets for European corporations. The Mercosur-European
Business Forum (MEBF) has been awarded a key role in the negotiations,
instructing governments to further deepen the process of liberalisation,
deregulation and privatisation."
The new info brief on the EU-Mercosur trade negotiations (co-published
by Corporate Europe Observatory and the Transnational Institute)
is online here
Welcome to the EC's Hall
of Shame
In
the run-up to the decisive WTO summit in Cancun (September 10-14),
Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) has launched a new website
exposing the shameful record of the European Commission (EC)
and Trade Commissioner Lamy in WTO negotiations.
A new website features ten case studies showing how,
in stark contrast to its self-proclaimed goals of "harnessed,
equitable globalisation", the Commission consistently promotes
the interests of big business at the expense of
the world's poor and environmental sustainability. Case
studies document the Commission's push for policies that kick
the development ladder out from under the world's poorest countries,
its addiction to undemocratic alliances with big business and
the ever-widening gap between EC rhetoric and reality.
Visit the European Commission's Hall of Shame: here
Legal analyses of proposed
EU Constitution
A series of legal analyses of the proposed EU Constitution has
been prepared for UK NGO Statewatch by Professor Steve Peers
of the University of Essex. Each of the analyses is annotated
to compare the current Treaties, practice and case law to the
proposed Constitution - and in the case of decision-making the
present division of powers to those proposed (including new
powers). The analyses can be read at
here
German Air Force Base
Closed for Weapons Inspection
On
the morning of Monday September 1, an international team of
thirty citizen inspectors closed the three gates of Buchel air
force base in Germany to carry out a war crimes inspection.
It is a "public secret" that 11 US B-61 tactical nuclear
weapons are stored on the base. Armed with clipboards, cameras
and pens the inspectors gathered information for the International
Atomic Energy Agency as well as for the UN where their findings
will be reported next year during the Non-Proliferation Preparatory
Committee in New York. Their report will also be made public
through the Internet.
The inspectors condemn the use of double standards by the German
and U.S. governments with respect to weapons of mass destruction.
The inspection follows the criticisms of the U.S. nuclear weapons
policy made earlier in the week by IEAE director Mohammed El
Baradei. "The U.S. government demands that other nations
not possess nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, it is arming itself,"
El Baradei told the weekly Der
Stern. "There are no good or bad nuclear weapons. If
we do not stop applying double standards, we will end up with
more nuclear weapons. We are at a turning point," he said.
Pol D'Huyvetter, one of the ten weapon inspectors who travelled
from Belgium, said that, "All countries who have signed
the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty-- including the U.S. and
Germany-- have agreed to start negotiations to achieve complete
nuclear disarmament. One of the first steps agreed by these
states was openness of the nuclear weapon arsenals. Meanwhile,
they keep their nuclear weapons bases completely secret. It
is for this reason that we need to take action as citizens to
investigate the base, and make this information public."
Although both the German Commander of the base, Mr. Martin Schelleis,
and the second in charge, Major Hans Helbach, were not willing
to make any official statement about the presence of weapons
of mass destruction on the German base, the inspectors uncovered
interesting information for their report to the UN and the public.
"It is also very alarming that the chief of police Mr.
Peter Magerl stated that there is no nuclear emergency plan
for when there is a plane accident involving a nuclear warhead"
declared Pol D'Huyvetter. The nuclear warheads include materials
such as plutonium and tritium, two very toxic radioactive materials
which could cause very serious contamination problems, both
for the environment and public health.
The citizen inspectors came from Austria, Belgium, Britain,
France, Germany, Malta, Sweden and the USA. There will continue
to be citizen inspection actions at nuclear related sites around
the world. On 25th October there will be an inspection at SHAPE
(the NATO military headquarters) in Mons, Belgium.
Pictures of the inspection can be seen here
Occupation of Iraq
"The UN became an accomplice in the illegal occupation
of Iraq and so became a target of militants resisting the US-UK
occupation. The UN should pull out of Iraq, and refuse to return
until the US ends its occupation. Only then should UN humanitarian
agencies go back to work in support of the people of Iraq."
Read Phyllis Bennis at here
and her online discussion about the bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq
with the readers of the Washington Post, which was held on 20
August 2003 at here
Cuba
"Assessing the Cuban Revolution 50 Years After
Moncada" by Saul Landau: "Cuba is criticised for a
lack of democracy and political freedom. The Cuban revolution
does repress those who disagree, which is a serious issue. But
this should not obscure the fact that it has real enemies, who
have attacked it violently for more than forty-four years. Cubans
at least have the advantages of institutional equality and services
sorely lacking in most of the third world - thanks to the Revolution."
Read the rest at here
Space warriors
With no fanfare, the Bush Administration is taking military
control of what it terms "near space," thereby laying
claim to the area of the Solar System that lies between the
Earth
and the Moon's orbit. Read the rest of Joel Bleiffus's "Rods
from the Gods" here
