The WTO, the World Food System, and the Politics of Harmonised Destruction Gerard Greenfield Education Programme Organiser (Indonesia) IUF-A/P IUF-A/P Globalisation Seminar II: Globalisation and the Future of Agri-Food Workers November 16-18, 1998, Ahmedabad, India ______________________________________________________________________________ 1. Introduction Only three years after its creation, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has had a dramatic and far-reaching impact on our lives. Rising unemployment and declining living standards brought about by the rush towards `zero' tariffs and subsidies, destructive competition inflicted by Transnational Corporations (TNCs) under `free market access', the reversal or revision of domestic laws and regulations to bring them into line with new international standards, and the undemocratic rulings on trade disputes involving everything from bananas to telephone directories, is proof enough that the WTO is capable of turning all our fears of GATT into a reality. This paper will focus on four aspects of the WTO's impact on the world food system and the role of agri-food Transnational Corporations (TNCs): (I) The reality of the WTO's agenda for `free trade', `free competition' and a `level playing-field' in agriculture is based on greater inequality, the monopolisation and centralisation of control of the agri-food industry by TNCs, and massive dumping of agri-food exports by the major industrialised countries. (ii) The harmonisation of national and sub-national laws and regulations to conform with the new global standards devised by private industry and imposed by the WTO. The result is the systematic destruction of efforts to protect the collective rights, health, and livelihood of working people and our capacity to exercise democratic controls over capital. (iii) Like the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in the OECD, the plan to include a Multilateral Investment Agreement (MIA) in the WTO will create a global charter for the rights of TNCs and further consolidate their power. (iv) Rather than signaling a decline in the power of the state, the WTO agenda requires a more powerful state to act against attempts by mass movements and organised labour to impose democratic controls on capital. Ultimately the aim of the neoliberal globalisation project is to lock the state into the networks of power of TNCs. ----- The complete article is at: http://www.labournet.org/discuss/global/wto.html Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
