Stop the GATSastrophe
Much of the agenda protestors so vigorously opposed at the WTO talks in Seattle, and in the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), is steadily making its way onto the international rulebook through a largely unheard of agreement.
A massive expansion of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is the next phase in the global liberalisation project.
The World Development Movement has been running a campaign since last autumn to highlight the dangers of the discussions on GATS currently taking place in Geneva which will culminate in March of this year.
The campaign was launched at an impressive rally in London November 9 attended by over 1000 people and addressed by veterans of the anti-globalisation movement Naomi Klein and George Monbiot.
Klein argued that "Public services are the public tangible manifestation and expression of our shared values as citizens. How we choose to heal our sick, teach our kids, protect our water, connect to one another through transport and communication are expressions of our collective vision for society.
"This idea is an extremely threatening one to the free market, which is what the attempts to extend the World Trade Organisation's reach into services is really all about. In market terms services are not an expression of our will as citizens, but opportunities for foreign investment - untapped resources"
Monbiot, who has written about GATS in the press, pointed out that:
"Big business wants a single, harmonised global market in which it can trade under precisely the same conditions everywhere, with as few barriers to its operations - in the form of regulation, public ownership or organised labour - as possible. And this is precisely what it has been getting.
"Big business has to get bigger because the market it has engineered is growing to embrace the whole world. As harmonisation means that only the very biggest companies will win, each one is trying to get bigger than any other."
GATS was originally agreed at the World Trade Organisation discussion in 1994. The aim of this agreement is to remove any restrictions and internal government regulations in the area of service delivery that are considered to be 'barriers to trade'.
As the WDM briefing In whose service makes clear:
"Those intent on pursuing liberalisation, frustrated by the demise of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998, and collapse of trade talks in Seattle in 1999, now see GATS as their golden opportunity. As a result, all kinds of agendas are being pursued in the continuing negotiations around this agreement, which now extends beyond any reasonable definition of either trade or services".
The service industry is big business, covering about two-thirds of economic activity in industrialised countries. The powerful companies want to operate freely within the service sector, but much of it is owned and regulated by governments.
Freeing up the trade in services will benefit business and the GATS is designed to do this. Unsurprisingly, corporations have been the driving force behind the agreement.
The negotiations taking place in Geneva aim to extend the 1994 agreement. Governments are under pressure to drastically reorganise the ownership and delivery of services within their countries, and subject them to even tighter 'free trade' rules.
At the same time, negotiators from the world's richest countries are pushing for this liberalisation process to be speeded up.
The GATS liberalisation agenda threatens basic service delivery. If multinationals are seeking to make a profit out of water, health and education, those without purchasing power are likely to lose out.
Recent water privatisation in Puerto Rico has meant that poor communities have gone without water while US military bases and tourist resorts enjoy an unlimited supply. A system governed by people's ability to pay will not bring desperately needed services to the world's poorest people.
Moreover, the irreversibility of GATS will ensure that once governments have opened up particular service sectors to WTO rules, there is no going back. The decision of how to organise service delivery is effectively being removed from the political arena. In future, citizens will no longer have the democratic right to decide whether or not services should be regulated.
One of the strengths of the WDM is that unlike campaigns such as Jubilee 2000 it has consistently pointed out that trade and debt can't be dealt with separately This is a mistake that campaigners in advanced capitalist countries often make.
If industrialised countries had not stacked the terms of trade so heavily in their own favour, Southern countries would not have fallen so deeply into debt As Charles Abugre of Third World Network argues
"Debt and trade are inextricably linked. Unfair trade rules left Africa in debt and debt has allowed creditors to impose further unfair trade rules on Africa."
Instead of rectifying this imbalance to allow countries to pay off their debts, Northern governments insisted debtor nations integrate even further into the unequal global market, leaving them even deeper in debt.
For Southern activists, the 'free market' simply transfers resources from the South to the North, whether it's through debt or through trade, through the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organisation.
The WDM have highlighted the fact that resistance to globalisation in the south gets very little coverage in the media here. While Seattle, Prague and Nice were inspiring on our TV screens, it would also give a fuller picture of the scope of the fightback that exists if we saw the protests that have taken place across Latin America, Africa and Asia to policies that squeeze people even harder there.
Many of Bolivia's poorest families received water bills totalling a third of their income when the government sold the public water system with International Water (of London) taking a major share. The charges that the company imposed were so crippling that they sparked mass protest. For many low-income families water cost more than food. Even collecting rainwater in rooftop tanks became illegal without a permit.
Hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Cochabamba city in April 2000. Soldiers sent in to quell the protests killed six and injured hundreds of others. The governor of the state resigned saying he did not want to be responsible for the 'bloodbath' that would follow the Bolivian government's refusal to reverse the privatisation.
In the end, the protestors won - International Water was kicked out of Bolivia and the government accepted the protestors' demands to put control of water in local hands.
If current negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) continue, it would be difficult, if not impossible for the Bolivian government to go back on its privatisation decision.
Despite these important strengths, the WDM campaign has one crucial weakness - one it shares with many other similar organisations. Its focus is on research, education and the lobbying of politicians.
But the lessons of the struggles it talks about ,whether in the south or the north, are that only mass action will defeat the neo-liberal steamroller.
Socialists and trade unionists must find ways to act on these issues urgently before global capital takes away more of our services, livelihoods and lives.
For further information on GATS contact WDM