December 14, 1999
by Vandana Shiva

For the past five years, the primary justifications for W.T.O. have been arguments about the inevitability of globalisation and the argument of helplessness of the Third World in the face of a single super power.

As recently as March 1999, at a high level Trade and Environment symposium, a free trade theorist Fred Bergstom argued that we could not stop or reverse globalisation because it was like a bicycle - if it stopped, we would fall. He had clearly not ridden a bicycle, because every bicycle rider knows that all you have to do to stop a bicycle is put your foot down.

That is what the citizens and Third World governments did in Seattle. They put their foot down and the machinery came grinding to a halt. All mythology of "natural phenomena" and "inevitability" evaporated in thin air.

Globalisation is not like a bicycle - we can get off bicycles. It is more like the escalator which crushed an 8 year old girl, Jyotsana Jethani to death at the Indira Gandhi International Airport on the morning of 13th December 1999 because it could not be stopped. Nobody knew how to switch the escalator off or where the switch was. The escalator grinded to a halt only after it was jammed by the body of the child.

W.T.O. is building the worlds economic and political architecture like the escalator. By dismantling regulations and trade restrictions, a system is being created in which no one knows where the switch is and who is responsible to switch it off. The rules of W.T.O are ensuring that neither local communities nor national governments can regulate trade or investment under free trade. Switches to the economic escalator are being taken out of our hands, and being put beyond our reach so that it cannot be stopped, even as ecosystems and people are crushed to death and people watch helplessly. Little Jyotsana symbolises the fate of millions who are being crushed in the unstoppable machine of global free trade.

The protests in Seattle were about getting the switches to the global economy back in peoples hands and under democratic control to prevent total social and ecological breakdown.

Seattle dispensed with the myth that globalisation and free trade cannot be stopped or challenged. It also got rid of the argument that the U.S as the only super pwer would always have its way.

Firstly, the super power was under the siege of citizens from across the world - farmers, women, young people, the environmental community and workers, and it behaved as brutally as any anti-people government does in the face of people's resistance. Seattle was the Tianamin Square of the U.S., and it was a leading Chinese human rights activist who made the analogy.

Secondly, the African, Caribbean and Latin American countries who had been totally excluded from the "green room" negotiations, also rebelled against the W.T.O and the U.S., and refused to be bullied any further.

Thirdly, even major players from the Third World such as India, whose government forced the Uruguay Round decisions on their citizens inspite of massive protests from farmers and workers throughout the 90's, on the basis of the logic of the futility of standing up against a super power, took the super power on the issue of trade sanctions linked to labour issues.

Now that the arguments of inevitability have lost their steam, new mythology is being spun to save the W.T.O. W.T.O. has suddenly been redefined as the ultimate institution of the poor, even though it is the poor who bear the highest social and ecological burden of W.T.O. rules.

Mike Moore, the Director General of W.T.O. claimed that the W.T.O. protectors hurt the poor and the marginalised. "who are looking to us to help them" (Business Standard, 2.12.99).

Markose Arackal says "The events in Seattle have put a serious question mark on the ability of the World Trade Organisation in the near future anyway, to deliver a more liberal trade regime to the world's poor nations.

And that may rob us of the surest way to get rich fast, and remove widespread poverty in our part of the world" (Financial Express 9.12.99)

Swaminathan Anklesaria Iyer has declared W.T.O. the protector of India, the MNCs as India's "natural allies" and citizens groups as the "real enemies" of the Third World (Times of India, 12.12.99)

Politics and power is being redefined. The powerful of the world - in governments, politics media and business are emerging a new global alliance, transcanding North - South divides. This global alliance of the powerful sees people, people's organisations and NGO's as the biggest threat - both domestically and internationally. This is the core of Swaminathan Iyer's argument of MNCs as "natural allies" and NGOs as "real enemies".

A dictatorial and excluding political and economic system always sees people whose power and wealth is appropriated undemocratically and unjustly as a threat. A society in which people are the enemy and colonisers are friends is a colonised society it is a society which in which freedom has been destroyed for people and the nation. It is a society which is enslaved.

The powerful elites are institutionalising slavery through W.T.O.

The W.T.O as the institution of the poor is a new mythology being spun not to protect the poor but to protect W.T.O, and MNCs and hence perpetuate the trade rules which are the ultimate assault on the survival of the poor.

Trade liberalisation is dismantling the last protections of the poor - and robbing their last resources. For the thousands of farmers who have been pushed to commiting suicide due to indebtedness after the seed sector was opened up to MNCs, the economy had become like the Airport Escalator, consuming their very lives. For coastal communities whose lives have been devastated by the shrimp industry, for the small ghanis and oil mills and oilseed farmers whose markets have been snatched by imports of artificially cheap genetically engineered soya oil W.T.O., is not a protector but a threat.

Our national elites have declared themselves "natural allies" of global corporations and are trying to transfer all our ecological and social wealth from the people to business and industry, including MNCs.

The announcement of the formation of 8 working groups by the Prime Minister under the leadership of businessmen and traders is part of this hijack of the nation and the total exclusion of citizens from the making of public policy including vital areas of food, health and education.

The privatisation of IIT's and institutions of higher learning will soon be followed by globalisation of education. One of the U.S. proposals for the W.T.O. Seattle meeting was to enlarge services in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) to include health and education, transform them from being fundamental rights into freely traded commodities, accessible on global markets for those who have the purchasing power. This clearly leaves the large majority without access to basic needs and will push millions out of jobs and livelihoods.

The natural elites have formed a new alliance with global corporations. They want and need W.T.O. because the W.T.O. rules offer them protectionism from the people and insulation from democracy, and it is people and democracy that the elite are most afraid of. The W.T.O. rules allow them to bypass India's constitution and the fundamental rights that it embodies. W.T.O. protects the elite of India and their global allies from the people of India. It does not protect the poor of India.

The new mythology of W.T.O. as the protector of the poor will not convince the millions who are paying for globalisation and free trade with their very lives.