Brussels, 21/01/2002 (Agence Europe) - Following a comprehensive assessment of the outcome of the 4th ministerial conference of the World Tade Organisation (WTO), some one hundred associations representing civil society throughout the world have launched an attack against the legitimacy of the Doha Declaration, at the end of an "outrageous process of manipulation" and "discrimination" which is "totally unacceptable for an international organisation".
This outcome, called "development agenda" or even "development round", can in fact best be called "Everything but Development", say the 121 NGOs signatories to the joint declaration published last week. The proof, they go on, is that the work programme covers the four so-called "Singapore issues" (investment, competition, transparency in government procurement, trade facilitation), despite the opposition of a large number of developing countries, as well as thousands of NGOs and social movements; this will lead the WTO in two years "nearer a development disaster of great proportions, as the proposed new agreements would close off many development policies and possibilities and result in re-colonisation and unprecedented powers to global corporations at the expense of sovereignty and people's rights and needs", they claim.
The NGOs, including ATTAC, Via Campesia, les Amis de la Terre, focus, Public Citizens, Third World Networks, etc., also denounce the fact that the Doha Declaration: does not make any significant progress on developing countries' implementing concerns, and thus the "immense" problems arising from the existing WTO agreements will intensify, that it does not make any "real" commitment to support the concept of food sovereignty (reduction in direct and indirect support for export as well as dumping of artificially cheap food exports to developing countries), that it "does not resolve any of the negative consequences of the TRIPS Agreement (agreement on intellectual property rights affecting trade), including biopiracy and the respect of basic consumer rights, despite the declaration on access to medicines "which does not add legally to the right of states to take public health measures" and, among other things, it facilitates the liberalisation and privatisation of natural resources, which threatens people's rights worldwide to water and other natural resources.
According to them, this "disastrous" outcome is the fruit of a "manipulative and discriminatory" process, which discarded the "clear" opposition of a "vast number of developing countries to negotiations on the new aforementioned subjects" and on industrial tariff barriers, as well as the establishment of a Trade Negotiations Committee (which is to begin work in Geneva next Monday: Ed.) and to the "unique commitment" by which nothing is gained as long as there is no agreement on all the issues on the Agenda. They then stigmatise the "façade" of transparency that the WTO and the backers of the new round maintained, before and at Doha, the combination of the "carrot and the stick" used by developed countries to make the most reluctant of the developing countries bend to their wishes, the holding of a final "Green Room" meeting for only 24 countries selected on no obvious criteria, etc.. "We condemn the non-transparent, discriminatory and rule-less or arbitrary methods and processes presided over by the WTO Director General and the secretariat and directed by the major developed countries" stresses the declaration, returning as conclusion to the motto of the anti-globalisationists: "The world is not for sale".