Protest echoes round world

By Greg Ansley

MELBOURNE - An eclectic group of demonstrators will march this morning on a "corporate scumbags tour" from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to the Stock Exchange in Collins St, Melbourne.

Their target is meeting half a globe away in Seattle, Washington, where, if the organisers' expectations are met, another 70,000 will choke the streets in a protest reminiscent of the Vietnam War days.

Much of the language will be the same: capitalist conspiracies, exploitation of the weak by the powerful, superpower hegemony and the like.

But it will be joined by a potentially more potent coalition of environmentalists honed by several decades of highly effective lobbying and protest management, unions and Third World activists who believe their countries are being sold down the river.

The eye of this storm is the World Trade Organisation, assembling in what will be - even without the clamour outside - an extremely difficult meeting to lay down the programme for a new round of negotiations on global trade liberalisation.

Unlike the protesters, the WTO does not yet have an agenda.

The opposition it faces will make that agenda a more elusive creature, given the deepening fears of globalisation sweeping the world and the effectiveness of such organisations as Greenpeace in massaging public opinion.

Anti-WTO forces now span the world and embrace a spectrum that runs from trade unions, non-government aid organisations (NGOs) and a resurgent left, to conservationists, indigenous groups and development economists.

Their weapons and tactics include both foot soldiers on the streets and cyberspace, where any number of anti-globalisation websites spread the word: "Let our resistance be as transnational as capital."

"The WTO claims it wants non-discrimination and transparency," says Martin Bush, a spokesman for the Globalisation Action Group in Melbourne.

"So do we. But we want non-discrimination against marginalised communities and transparent business decision-making.

"The WTO doesn't seem very interested in that."

Mr Bush remains angry that Australian Trade Minister Mark Vaile rejected an offer by such groups as the Conservation Foundation and Community Aid Abroad to pay their own way to Seattle to represent disadvantaged groups and the environment.

He in turn rejects Mr Vaile's argument that Seattle is about trade, not labour or the environment: "For underpaid outworkers in textile industries and for logging in old-growth forests there can be no separation of trade issues from labour standards or the environment."

Zapatista guerrillas in Mexico, according to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, have echoed Mr Bush's sentiments in their declaration of the WTO as mankind's biggest enemy.

In Seattle itself, protest organiser Peoples' Global Action stirred its followers with rhetoric of grassroots revolution: "We must act together and unite our struggles against the social, political and economic institutions of the capitalist system."

But a much broader and potentially more damaging level of opposition to the WTO lies in the rapidly emerging coalition between trade unions and environmentalists and their argument that if intellectual property rights, for example, can be included in the WTO, why must labour standards, environmental safeguards and human rights be excluded.

Environmentalists use cases in which the WTO has ruled against national green laws because of their infringement on free trade to demonstrate the dangers they see in further reform.

New reports of potential risk are mushrooming.

One, by Earthjustice Legal Defence Fund, a splinter group from America's august Sierra Club, claims that US pesticide safeguards for children requiring additional measures where scientific evidence is incomplete, could be overruled by global trade rules.

Union fears that more trade reforms which do not include labour standards will deeply erode conditions for workers in the West and entrench poverty in the Third World are also gaining ground in societies that have seen local industries swamped by imports or taken over by foreign corporations.

Third World Network writer Bhagirath Lai Das argues that the WTO is being used to smooth the passage of multinationals.

"The fear is that the means of production ... will effectively pass into the hands of the big firms of the advanced industrialised countries," he says.

"Production structure in developing countries ... may be reduced to just being satellites of these big firms.

"Governments and societies in developing countries will also become weak."

Already, NGOs claim, trade reform is being used by Europe to end the 24-year-old Lome Agreement providing non-reciprocal trade preferences to imports from 21 former European colonies.

Trade is now on everyone's agenda.