By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Dec 16 2005 (IPS)

Social action movements that have been following the World Trade Organisation (WTO) debates in Hong Kong from a distance are of the opinion that if the meeting ends without a firm agreement, it will mainly be of benefit to the countries of the developing South, which need more time to strengthen their bargaining position.

“We do not at all believe that it would be a failure to conclude the meeting without an agreement,” activist Jorge Carpio, of the Argentine organisation Foco (Focus), told IPS. Foco organised debates on poverty and free trade, in which activists from all around the world took part, parallel to the Fourth Summit of the Americas held in Mar del Plata, Argentina in November

In Argentina, Foco coordinates the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) in which some 1,500 non-governmental organisations and social action movements participate worldwide, with the aim of promoting measures against extreme poverty and hunger.

“It doesn’t matter how long the WTO negotiations take. On the contrary: we need time to recover from the devastation caused by the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. If no agreement is reached, we will have some breathing room in which to recover, re-establish alliances between countries of the South, and prepare to bargain from a better position,” explained Carpio.

At the Sixth WTO Ministerial Conference, running Dec. 13-18 in Hong Kong, nobody expects spectacular agreements or progress given the irreconcilable differences between the industrialised North and developing countries. The most optimistic observers merely hope for approval of a timetable for continuing the talks in 2006.

>From this viewpoint, Carpio emphasised that the emergence in August 2003 of the Group of 20 (G20) developing countries as a forum for coordinating positions on trade issues has contributed greatly to strengthening the strategy of putting the brakes on agreements and gaining precious time.

The G20 is currently made of 21 nations: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

According to Carpio, other countries, while not actually members of the group, also feel that they are represented by it.

Meanwhile, civil society organisations are also raising awareness about issues such as world trade and its impacts on daily life, the economy, political stability and the environment.

In the last few weeks, Foco held workshops in Buenos Aires, aimed especially at the unemployed, whose organisations are known as “piqueteros” because of their main protest strategy of holding roadblocks (piquetes).

The activists have also worked with teachers’ unions, educating them about the impact of free trade on the economies of the South, and offering them teaching materials they can use to study the links between trade, unemployment and poverty.

The participants in the workshops which drew piquetero activists began by talking about their immediate concerns about inflation and the lack of employment opportunities, and gradually began to relate these facts to a wider, more global process.

Carpio said that although the issue of trade might appear to be unconnected with the problems of people who are poor and unemployed, it is not. The participating activists “recognised that the explosion in unemployment in Argentina took place in the 1990s, when trade was liberalised to a record-breaking extent,” he noted.

In Argentina, the free-market reforms of the 1990s last decade resulted in a catastrophic political, social and economic collapse which brought the government down in 2001 and left a deep-rooted social crisis in its wake. Poverty reached 54 percent of the population and unemployment soared above 20 percent.

“If there are no trade barriers in our countries, our factories cannot compete with products imported from developed countries, and people link that immediately to their own experience and living conditions,” Carpio said. But the process of understanding these connections takes time, he added.

In November, Foco conducted a series of workshops in Mar del Plata, which hosted the Summit of the Americas, with the purpose of taking a common stance in the run-up to the Hong Kong meeting.

Taking part in workshops were Elizabeth Tang, of the Hong Kong People’s Alliance, Steve Hellinger, president of The Development Gap and coordinator of the Alliance for Responsible Trade, from the United States, Chilean Claudio Lara, representing Consumers International, and Dave Spooner, executive secretary of the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations.

“Trade unions and NGOs are concerned that the WTO negotiations … will have a massive impact on employment in the agricultural, industrial, fisheries, forestry and services sectors,” the activists said in a communiqué issued after the meeting.

The groups concluded that the promises of welfare and full employment in the WTO’s founding charter have never been fulfilled.

“The WTO’s trade and investment rules have taken the world in the opposite direction, and the current negotiations threaten to take us further still,” the activists warned.

“Increased liberalisation of trade in agricultural products … was supposed to bring benefits to all. But the only winners were the global agri-food TNCs (transnational corporations),” they said.

Furthermore, they emphasised that “if cheap imports flood countries with weak industrial sectors, these industries will be wiped out, causing higher unemployment.”

The way the negotiations are going, “they are not taking us towards decent jobs nor development, and they may cause massive unemployment and destruction of livelihoods, and deprive governments of much-needed income that now comes from tariffs.”

The WTO talks are bogged down and it seems unlikely that an agreement combining a real reduction of agricultural subsidies in the rich world with a more moderate freeing up of developing countries’ markets, in terms of services and industrial tariffs, will be reached next year.

Many observers believe that if a minimal agreement about how to move forward is not achieved, the Hong Kong meeting will have been a failure. But the representatives of social action movements hold a very different view.

“It would only be a failure for countries that have everything to gain. But we have everything to lose, and much, much more to gain if we have a little more time,” Carpio asserted.

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