WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: Porto Alegre and Davos Invert Roles

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jan 28 2003 (IPS) - The World Economic Forum (WEF) will have to begin to define itself as a counterpoint to the World Social Forum (WSF), the reverse of what has been the case over the past three years, according to activists meeting in this southern Brazilian city.

Cándido Grzybowski, a member of the WSF organising committee, said Tuesday at the closing press conference of the third annual edition of the forum that in just three years, the global gathering of social movements and progressive personalities from around the world had changed the global agenda with its insistence that social questions must take precedence over profits.

Next year’s WSF will be hosted by India, at a date and location that have yet to be determined. But the global conference will no longer coincide with the WEF, which has drawn the world’s top business, financial and political leaders to the Swiss resort city of Davos every year since 1971.

That decision, adopted at this year’s forum in Porto Alegre, the capital of the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, is a demonstration that the WSF has moved beyond the phase of simply countering the meeting of the rich and powerful in Davos.

In 2005, the WSF will return to Porto Alegre, the symbol of the gathering that aims to become more ”international” by moving to Asia next year, said Grzybowski, director of the Brazilian Institute of Economic and Social Analyses (IBASE).

Grzybowski is one of the eight members of the committee that organised the first three WSF annual meetings, the first of which took place in 2001.

More than 100,000 people took part in this year’s forum, which began Jan 23, including 20,763 delegates of 5,717 organisations from 156 countries, according to the summary of the gathering presented Tuesday.

The six days of sessions included 32 panels, 10 conferences, four round tables and 1,286 workshops and seminars.

Grzybowski also noted that 4,094 journalists were accredited, representing 1,423 media outlets from 51 countries – ”a greater number of reporters than those assigned to cover United Nations conferences or world football championships.”

”That means we won the battle on the information front, as we were granted ample space in the leading media outlets of many countries,” he said.

A total of 120 professional simultaneous interpreters – 80 percent of the total licenced in Brazil – worked at the WSF.

”We ensured more democratic participation” by offering simultaneous translation to Spanish, French and Portuguese, instead of only to English as is usually the case in international economic and technical meetings, Sergio Xavier Ferreira, the coordinator of the service – which was ”the forum’s single biggest expense” – told IPS.

Around 80 volunteers from several different countries joined the professionals in providing simultaneous translation services.

The 80 translators formed part of a battalion of 650 volunteers who played a decisive role in the six-day gathering, the events of which were held mainly in the Catholic University, a basketball/volleyball stadium, and port warehouses.

The decision to hold next year’s forum in India will heighten the diversity of the gathering, paving the way for greater participation by Asia, said Francisco Whitaker, another of the organisers, and a representative of the Brazilian Commission for Justice and Peace, which is linked to the Catholic Church.

One of the tasks of the WSF international council is to encourage the participation of regions where it remains weak, like the Caribbean, Central America and Africa. But the initiative ”should emerge from local civil society organisations,” said Whitaker.

The WSF is a ”factory of thought,” an ”industry of ideas,” which seeks consensuses, rejects ”one-track thinking,” and defends diversity of opinions and exchange of viewpoints between countries and the various sectors of civil society, said Grzybowski.

”We share principles and ethical values, not ideologies,” he underlined.

The WSF’s independence is reflected in its very accounts, said the organisers. Most of the budget came from the participants themselves, who covered their own expenses for transport, lodging and meals, which ran to a total of 50 million dollars, according to estimates by the local business community.

Registration fees brought in an additional 800,000 dollars that went towards the operational costs of the forum, whose final cost amounted to nearly 3.5 million dollars.

To those 800,000 dollars were added another 600,000 provided by the city government of Porto Alegre and the state government of Rio Grande do Sul, as well as donations from international foundations and non-governmental organisations, and from two Brazilian state-run companies which also helped sponsor the event.

The forum’s deficit stood at around 246,000 dollars, said the organisers.

The WSF is a space for dialogue among civil society, ”not an organisation representing the participating groups and people,” said organising committee member María Luiza Mendonça, the head of an umbrella of Brazilian human rights groups.

For that reason it does not adopt resolutions or issue final declarations, nor can it hold a dialogue with Davos or any other institution, she explained.

This year’s forum confirmed the concept that the WSF ”is not an event” but ”an ongoing process, a wave of citizen participation” that is growing and must ”conquer more hearts and minds” to build the utopia that ”another world is possible,” said Grzybowski.