From: Misty 
Subject: SNET: Agreement To Auction World's Vital Resources
Date: 26 Apr 2001 06:49:52 -0400
To: SNET ,
        Armageddon or New Age? 

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Agreement To Auction World's Vital Resources
Posted 12th April 2001
By Vandana Shiva
http://www.pl.net/8politics/gatattack.html

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is the agreement being
most aggressively pushed through the "built-in agenda" of the WTO though no
new round was possible in Seattle because of people's protests and a
developing country backlash against their exclusion in trade negotiations.
"Services" include health and education, water and environment, energy and
transport, food distribution and even government public service. The 1994
GATS categories are: Business; communication (telecoms, postal,
audiovisual); Construction and related engineering services; Distribution;
Educational; Environmental (water delivery, energy, refuse disposal);
Financial; Health related and social Tourism and Travel related
recreational, cultural and sporting; and Transport (sea, air, rail, road)
and other.

Hence every aspect of our lives is up for sale and every aspect of human
needs and every form of human activity is being redefined as a tradeable
service. The WTO has drafted clever language about GATS being a "bottom up"
treaty rather than a `"top down" treaty because a country can make
commitmentsfor trade liberation in different sectors through progressive
liberalisation. Not a "bottom up" treaty A treaty that totally bypasses
national democratic decision- making and excludes citizen participation can
hardly be called `"bottom up". To be truly "bottom up", the rules and
subject matter of GATS need to first be discussed among local communities
and regional and national parliaments. They then need to be amended on the
basis of democratic feedback. Without such a "democracy round", GATS is not
a "bottom up" but a "top down" agreement being forced on the people of the
world. The fact that governments, as members of WTO, are putting the lives
and securities of their citizens on auction to global corporations through
GATS does not make the agreement legitimate or reflecting the will of
people. GATS is impinging on issues of culture, resources and dispute
resolution which under some national laws and constitutions are not under
the jurisdiction of federal governments negotiating in WTO.

The philosophy of GATS is the auctioning of vital resources and essential
services and transforming them from fundamental rights of citizens to
markets for global corporations. Through GATS, in effect our lives have been
put up for sale. Global energy and water corporations such as Enron, Suez,
Vivendi, health and education, businesses such as the health management
organisations (HMOs) in the U.S are pushing for liberalisation of trade in
services. Even mining and logging corporations are riding on the back of
GATS. And corporations trading in hazardous waste are trying to use GATS.
Water privatisation It is being argued that because this trade is already
larger than trade in merchandise, service sectors should be commercialised
and globalised. The promise is that services would be provided more
efficiently and prices of essential services would reduce. But the
experience of water privatisation in Bolivia, Puerto Rico and Argentina and
energy privatisation in California and Maharashtra state in India shows that
this is totally false. In Bolivia, when public water system was sold to
Bechtel and International water prices increased dramatically. Finally, the
corporations were kicked out. In 1995, when water was privatised in Puerto
Rico, poor communities had no water, while tourist resorts and U.S. military
bases enjoyed unlimited supply. In Argentina, when Generale de Eaux got a
contract for water delivery, prices doubled and quality deteriorated. The
company was forced to pull out when people refused to pay their bills.

The WTO briefing of March 16, 2001, entitled "GATS: Fact and Fiction" uses
four arguments to allay citizens fears that GATS will lead to the
dismantling of rights to water, health and education.

(1.) Art. 1 of GATS excludes "services supplied in the exercise of
governmental authority".

(2.) GATS does not oblige countries to privatise or deregulate services.

(3.) GATS does not oblige countries to open up their markets. In what is
termed the "bottom-up" approach to liberalisation, governments can choose
which services they open up and to what degree.

(4.) GATS does not prevent countries tightening regulations or reversing
previous decisions to allow service provision by foreigners.

Each of these responses is misleading.

Article I of GATS is recognised as ambiguous and does lend itself to the
interpretation that public services are candidates for privatisation and
liberalisation if services are offered on "commercial basis" or "in
competition with one or more service suppliers." Since public services also
have a fee, this could be interpreted as being commercial. Since there are
always private actors in health, in education, this could be interpreted as
being in competition. But small schools and private clinics are different
from global corporations seeking trade liberalisation of services. The very
fact of putting vital service sectors up for trade liberalisation in the
GATS classification for commitments, and allowing the entry of corporations
in sectors which were beyond commerce is forcing the Third World to lock its
essential services and scarce resources into the violent and unjust dispute
settlement and trade sanction system of the WTO.

Robbed of freedom While WTO repeatedly refers to the "freedom of
countries'', its rules and rule-making processes rob weaker countries of
freedom. Contrary to the propaganda that WTO rules serve the interests of
the poor, the rules are rules of commercialisation - shaped and defined by
powerful corporations to increase their power and profits. None of the WTO
arguments respond to the citizens' criticism of the principle of
marketisation of essential services enshrined in GATS. That remains the goal
and objective of GATS. The WTO response is a weak attempt at allaying
realistic fears of citizens by using speed of processes of implementation as
an excuse to say the goals might not be reached. But the fact that a car can
go off the road, or not start or start with delay cannot be used to deny the
existence of a highway. GATS is the highway to the privatisation of our
lives, and the highway leads in the wrong direction.

That is the central issue of the debate on trade in services. How and when
different countries start their engines to drive down this highway is a
secondary question. That they might not start at the same time, or might
have different models of cars will not change the fact that once they are on
the road to liberalisation of services, all will reach the same
destination - a destination where water, health and education cannot be
guaranteed to all members of society because they are no longer rights
provided through public services, but are commodities to be bought in the
market place. The history of the Uruguay Round provides a good lesson of how
issues that do not belong to WTO have been brought into WTO, issues that
were never negotiated or accepted by the majority of members but were forced
on them. TRIPs, agriculture, investment, services are not subject matters of
trade - As the post-Seattle NGO Campaign stated, "WTO needs to shrink or it
will sink''.

The U.S. and European Union pressure to commercialise essential services
through GATS so that their corporations can make money out of the survival
needs of the poor is a new wave of crimes agains the economy unleashed
through WTO. Trade liberalisation of agriculture is killing thousands of
farmers, the TRIPs agreement is denying cures to millions suffering from
Malaria, T.B., HIV/AIDS. Instead of pausing and taking stock of the
destructive impact of WTO rules of agriculture, written by and enforced on
behalf of 5 grain trading giants and TRIPs rules made by the pharmaceutical
and life sciences corporations, the WTO is rushing headlong into writing new
rules on behalf of corporations wanting to control our water, our health,
our education. That is why, as we move towards the next WTO Ministerial in
Qatar in November, we will be organising and mobilising worldwide with the
common call "Our World is Not for Sale: Stop Corporate Globalisation". GATS
should be put into deep freeze. The future of services, and people's rights
to water, health and education needs to be democratically debated within
each society and country. Only after a "democracy round", in which ordinary
people can take part, should issues be brought to WTO. Without democratic
debate, WTO agreements have no legitimacy. The citizens' agenda cannot
continue to be preempted by the corporate agenda and then forced
undemocratically on people. (The writer is Director, Research Foundation for
Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi.) wtc.jpg Name: .







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