By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Nov 29 1999 (IPS)

The World Trade Organization (WTO), which meets in Seattle Tuesday for its third ministerial conference, is having an increasing impact on the lives of ordinary people everywhere.

Yet the workings of the “mother of all trade deals” generally are a mystery to all but a secretive inner circle of professional trade experts from the more than 130 nations gathered in Seattle.

With his new book: ‘A Citizen’s Guide, the World Trade Organization’, Canadian environment lawyer Steven Shrybman aims to broaden people’s understanding of the powerful un-elected body that he believes is beginning to whittle away the sovereignty of nations and supercede their governments.

Published by the Ottawa based Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the book demonstrates how participating countries are more and more finding that their hands are tied by the enforcement machinery of the WTO or, as in Canada’s case, by rules of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Various Canadian government policies have been the casualties of international trade disputes with other governments. They include fisheries conservation measures; cultural support programs for domestic magazines, book publishers and filmmakers; toxic fuel additive standards; and research and development funding for local high tech companies.

Canada is not guiltless in this tit-for-tat, says Shrybman. It too has used the trade dispute adjudication process to challenge worthwhile initiatives by other governments when they have interfered with its own trade priorities.

Ottawa has, for instance, joined challenges to U.S. marine conservation laws, initiated a successful complaint against European food safety regulations and recently filed a complaint against a French ban on Canadian asbestos.

Facing the possibility that all kinds of services will be on the table in Seattle, Canada’s trade minister Pierre Pettigrew denies claims by critics that the country’s public health and education systems are in danger of being compromised.

But one newspaper columnist wrote recently that “it is equally unlikely that Canada can find new markets for its world-beating electronic systems for delivering education to remote areas without facing pressure to open this country to foreign competition in delivering social programs.”

The columnist, like others, is not sure that Canada’s public health and education systems are at risk, particularly if Ottawa – under WTO rules – simply refuses to have them put on the table. The alternative might be to make concessions in unrelated trade areas in return for an exemption, he adds.

However, critics like Shrybman are worried that Canada is so locked into the WTO process that it might eventually be forced to open its free health care system to U.S. based commercial corporate profit-making health care providers, which charge for services that only the affluent can afford.

Such a change could undermine the universal principle of the Canadian system, where people regardless of income receive the same level of care.

For the author, what is currently happening in the world represents a “revolutionary departure” from previous international trade regimes which facilitated a consensual resolution of disputes among nations regarding the trade in goods or commodities.

Shrybman argues that with the proposed inclusion of standards, investment, services and intellectual property under the WTO rules, governments face binding decisions at the adjudication level that could undermine their capacity to regulate profit making corporations in areas that traditionally have had nothing to do with trade.

“It is clear that the WTO is a watershed in the evolution of international trade agreements in aid of formalizing and entrenching the conditions upon which globalization depends,” he says.

“Indeed, because of the breath of its application and the enforcement mechanisms available to ensure that its rules are observed, it is not unrealistic to regard the WTO as the first effective world government in history.”

Shrybman does not see a diabolical conspiracy to take over the world. Rather, he suggests that this assault on national sovereignty is the inevitable consequence of a corporate imperative to do away with all alleged impediments to economic activity, including domestic regulations and laws.

This has become more relevant with capital flows moving unencumbered across national borders and products manufactured in specific locales for the global market.

What remains irreconcilable are the principles of unregulated economic growth versus the perilous state of the Earth’s environment – witnessed in the ongoing destruction of species and the unchecked warming of the atmosphere which is caused by the release of industrial fossil fuels.

“A disturbing and similar consensus exists about the need for dramatic measures to halt what a majority of biologists now believe to be the early stages of the sixth great mass extinction of life on earth – this one, man-made,” Shrybman says.

“Yet the WTO entrenches the very dynamics of economic development that must be seen as the root cause of these ecological crises, while at the same time removing from governments the tools that will be needed to change our present course.”

Despite this sombre note, Shrybman sees hope in the fact that the impact of trade and economic policy on the environment, workers rights or culture are all being raised in international forums as interconnected issues rather than isolated concerns.

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