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An accord to auction vital resources
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The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is the agreement being
most aggressively pushed through the "built-in agenda" of the WTO
through no new round was possible in Seattle because of people's
protests and a developing country backlash against their exclusion in
trade negotiations. "Services" include health and education, water and
environment, energy and transport, food distribution and even
government public service.
The 1994 GATS categories are: -
Business; Communication (telecoms, postal, audiovisual) - Construction
and related engineering services - Distribution - Educational -
Environmental (water delivery, energy, refuse disposal) - Financial -
Health related and social - Tourism and Travel related recreational,
cultural and sporting - Transport (sea, air, rail, road) - and other
Hence
every aspect of our lives is up for sale and every aspect of human
needs and every form of human activity is being redefined as a tradeable
service.
The WTO has drafted clever language about GATS being a
"bottom up" treaty rather than a "top down" treaty because a country
can make commitments for trade liberation in different sectors through
progressive liberalisation.
Not a 'bottom up' treaty
A
treaty that totally bypasses national democratic decision- making and
excludes citizen participation can hardly be called "bottom up". To be
truly 'bottom up', the rules and subject matter of GATS need to first
be discussed among local communities and regional and national
parliaments. They then need to be amended on the basis of democratic
feedback. Without such a "democracy round", GATS is not a `bottom up'
but a `top down' agreement being forced on the people of the world. The
fact that governments, as members of WTO, are putting the lives and
securities of their citizens on auction to global corporations through
GATS does not make the agreement legitimate or reflecting the will of
people. GATS is impinging on issues of culture, resources and dispute
resolution which under some national laws and constitutions are not
under the jurisdiction of federal governments negotiating in WTO.
The
philosophy of GATS is the auctioning of vital resources and essential
services and transforming them from fundamental rights of citizens to
markets for global corporations. Through GATS, in effect our lives have
been put up for sale. Global energy and water corporations such as
Enron, Suez, Vivendi, health and education, businesses such as the
health management organisations (HMOs) in the U.S are pushing for
liberalisation of trade in services. Even mining and logging
corporations are riding on the back of GATS. And corporations trading in
hazardous waste are trying to use GATS.
Water privatisation
It
is being argued that because this trade is already larger than trade in
merchandise, service sectors should be commercialised and globalised.
The promise is that services would be provided more efficiently and
prices of essential services would reduce. But the experience of water
privatisation in Bolivia, Puerto Rico and Argentina and energy
privatisation in California and Maharashtra state in India shows that
this is totally false.
In Bolivia, when public water system was
sold to Bechtel and International water prices increased so dramatically
that people protested, six persons were killed, hundreds injured.
Finally, the corporations were kicked out. In 1995, when water was
privatised in Puerto Rico, poor communities had no water, while tourist
resorts and U.S. military bases enjoyed unlimited supply. In Argentina,
when Generale de Eaux got a contract for water delivery, prices doubled
and quality deteriorated. The company was forced to pull out when people
refused to pay their bills.
The WTO briefing of March 16, 2001,
entitled "GATS: Fact and Fiction" uses four arguments to allay
citizens fears that GATS will lead to the dismantling of rights to
water, health and education.
(1.) Art. 1 of GATS excludes
"services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority". (2.)
GATS does not oblige countries to privatise or deregulate services. (3.)
GATS does not oblige countries to open up their markets. In what is
termed the "bottom-up" approach to liberalisation, governments can
choose which services they open up and to what degree. (4.) GATS does
not prevent countries tightening regulations or reversing previous
decisions to allow service provision by foreigners.
Each of these responses is misleading
Article
I of GATS is recognised as ambiguous and does lend itself to the
interpretation that public services are candidates for privatisation and
liberalisation if services are offered on "commercial basis" or "in
competition with one or more service suppliers." Since public services
also have a fee, this could be interpreted as being commercial. Since
there are always private actors in health, in education, this could be
interpreted as being in competition. But small schools and private
clinics are different from global corporations seeking trade
liberalisation of services.
The very fact of putting vital
service sectors up for trade liberalisation in the GATS classification
for commitments, and allowing the entry of corporations in sectors which
were beyond commerce is forcing the Third World to lock its essential
services and scarce resources into the violent and unjust dispute
settlement and trade sanction system of the WTO.
Robbed of freedom
While
WTO repeatedly refers to the "freedom of countries", its rules and
rule-making processes rob weaker countries of freedom. Contrary to the
propaganda that WTO rules serve the interests of the poor, the rules are
rules of commercialisation - shaped and defined by powerful
corporations to increase their power and profits.
None of the WTO
arguments respond to the citizens' criticism of the principle of
marketisation of essential services enshrined in GATS. That remains the
goal and objective of GATS. The WTO response is a weak attempt at
allaying realistic fears of citizens by using speed of processes of
implementation as an excuse to say the goals might not be reached. But
the fact that a car can go off the road, or not start or start with
delay cannot be used to deny the existence of a highway. GATS is the
highway to the privatisation of our lives, and the highway leads in the
wrong direction. That is the central issue of the debate on trade in
services.
How and when different countries start their engines to
drive down this highway is a secondary question. That they might not
start at the same time, or might have different models of cars will not
change the fact that once they are on the road to liberalisation of
services, all will reach the same destination - a destination where
water, health and education cannot be guaranteed to all members of
society because they are no longer rights provided through public
services, but are commodities to be bought in the market place.
The
history of the Uruguay Round provides a good lesson of how issues that
do not belong to WTO have been brought into WTO, issues that were never
negotiated or accepted by the majority of members but were forced on
them. TRIPs, agriculture, investment, services are not subject matters
of trade - As the post-Seattle NGO Campaign stated, "WTO needs to
shrink or it will sink". The U.S. and European Union pressure to
commercialise essential services through GATS so that their corporations
can make money out of the survival needs of the poor is a new wave of
the genocide unleashed through WTO.
Trade liberalisation of
agriculture is killing thousands of farmers, the TRIPs agreement is
denying cures to millions suffering from Malaria, T.B., HIV/AIDS.
Instead of pausing and taking stock of the destructive impact of WTO
rules of agriculture, written by and enforced on behalf of 5 grain
trading giants and TRIPs rules made by the pharmaceutical and life
sciences corporations, the WTO is rushing headlong into writing new
rules on behalf of corporations wanting to control our water, our
health, our education. That is why, as we move towards the next WTO
Ministerial in Qatar in November, we will be organising and mobilising
worldwide with the common call "Our World is Not for Sale: Stop
Corporate Globalisation". GATS should be put into deep freeze. The
future of services, and people's rights to water, health and education
needs to be democratically debated within each society and country. Only
after a "democracy round", in which ordinary people can take part,
should issues be brought to WTO. Without democratic debate, WTO
agreements have no legitimacy. The citizens' agenda cannot continue to
be preempted by the corporate agenda and then forced undemocratically on
people.
Broad alliances consisting of the women's movement, the
environment movement, the education movement, the health movement, the
basic needs and anti-poverty movements, and the economic and social
justice movements are joining forces to "stop the GATS attack". We
should be grateful to WTO for offering us this wonderful opportunity
through GATS for building solidarity across sectors and across the
world.
(The writer is Director, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi.)
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