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Pirates
of the Caribbean
By Solomon
Kebede
September is stormy
season in the Caribbean resort-town of Cancun. Far out on an
inaccessible causeway that reaches into the Gulf of Mexico, the World
Trade Organization prepared for its Fifth Ministerial meeting.
The WTO has always displayed a poor sense of symbolic local geography.
A quiet fishing village for most of the 20th century, Cancun was
chosen by a computer in 1970 to be the location for casino, sun, sex,
and resort-style tourism. Almost unparalleled in the country for the
level of inequality between rich and poor, it has one of the lowest
minimum wages ($3 a day) and the highest crime rate in Mexico.
The Zona Hotelera where the WTO Convention Centre is located is a
'plastic play land' of strip malls, sex clubs and burger joints
entirely separate from the real town. This is the dream of prosperity
that neoliberalism holds out for Mexico. There is a Rainforest Cafi
where you can buy souvenir leather jackets emblazoned with the words
'Save the Planet', built on the clear-cut of real rainforest. The
resorts appropriate and poison the groundwater for local workers who
live in poor suburbs nearby. Giant five-star faux-Mayan temple hotels
tower above the causeways upon which real, ragged descendents of the
Mayans sleep at night. This is a non-place, a place where everybody
comes from somewhere else, and there are no homegrown grassroots
political organizations to speak of. Most Mexicans are unable to
afford to come here to protest.
But modern day pirates of the Caribbean have nevertheless gathered on
the shore to try and shiver the WTO's timbers. A band of over 2,000
NGOs are there to beseech and condemn. International peasant farmer
organization Via Campesina is out in force, and farmers from Thailand
to Brazil to Honduras have joined Mexican counterparts in a large
encampment on the edge of town. Several thousand of them will attempt
to stop WTO delegates arriving at the Convention Centre. A caravan of
buses of students from Mexico City wove its way into town pursued by
police sirens; and another comes from Chiapas, the home state of
indigenous rebel army the Zapatistas who have sent a group of
delegates with these words: 'There will be mobilizations in Cancun and
throughout the world against those who think they are the owners of
the planet. The word of the Zapatistas will go to Cancun and to the
planet... In order to build a new world, all men and women must make
ourselves children of rebellion and resistance.'
Perhaps the present-day protesters really are the children of
rebellious pirates. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Yucatan
Peninsula sheltered pirates hiding from colonial law, and their
attacks ended Spanish control over some indigenous Mayan areas in the
region.
In this era the ultimate obstacle to free trade was pirate attacks
against the merchant ships of the Spanish and British Empires.
According to historians Linebaugh and Rediker, early anti-capitalists
included pirates who liberated slave ships and took them over,
mutinous sailors who joined the pirates, freed slaves, and other
outlaws. Sailing the Atlantic and traversing the Caribbean, these
'outcasts of the Nations of the Earth' transmitted revolutionary ideas
by sea, and created liberated autonomous zones beyond the reach of the
colonizers' authority.
Linebaugh and Rediker describe democratic pirate ships where the
outlaws decided things 'in common' and lived out a liberated
existence. As Linebaugh and Rediker write: 'The globalizing powers
have a long reach and endless patience. Yet the planetary wanderers do
not forget, and they are ever ready, from Africa to the Caribbean to
Seattle to resist slavery and restore the commons.'
The World Trade Organization is dogged by a terrible curse. Not only
is it pursued relentlessly by a motley band of fearless outlaws known
in Mexico as los globalifsbicos, but each step it takes towards a
world of multilateral free trade is slower, less sure, more plagued by
infighting, arm-twisting and stagnation. An institution in which at
each meeting the rich world pushes hard to get the poor world to open
markets in goods, services, and companies whilst ruthlessly protecting
its own markets is cursed indeed. And on the eve of the Cancun
meeting, it looks as though the WTO's ship may be sinking.
In 1999 the Third Ministerial meeting of the WTO in Seattle was met by
seventy-five thousand activists using decentralized direct action
techniques who locked-down and blockaded the conference centre.
Attacked from without and driven by revolt within a developing country
negotiators, strengthened by the protests, refused to be bullied by
the rich nations, the meeting collapsed and the WTO was unable to
launch a fresh round of trade negotiations.
'We must never meet in a democracy again,' was the WTO's post-Seattle
assessment. They chose Doha, Qatar -where protest is forbidden- as the
location for the 2001 meetings. Yet once again, the WTO had chosen
unwisely when the September 11 attacks and subsequent bombing of
Afghanistan made this venue spectacularly unpopular with Western
business lobbyists and frightened delegates. There was talk of
cancellation, but Qatar made it clear that this would cause grave
insult. Dick Cheney barked his orders and the delegates went to the
meeting armed with anthrax antidote and gas masks.
Heavy pressure on developing countries from the US and EU in Doha
finally led to an agreement to launch what they described as the
'Development Round' of trade liberalization. 'We are made to feel that
we are holding up the rescue of the global economy if we don't agree
to a new trade round here,' said an offended delegate from Jamaica.
Already the so-called Development Round has become known as an
Anti-Development Round, as promises to make trade rules more favorable
for poor nations have proved to be short-lived. For example the US is
backtracking on its concessions for developing countries' access to
generic medicines, given to secure the agreement in Doha, due to the
interventions of its pharmaceutical lobby.
On the WTO's agenda in Cancun are negotiations of existing rules from
previous rounds of talks such as liberalization of services (the
General Agreement on Trade in Services or GATS). That is trade in
'everything you can't pick up and throw', from electricity to water,
from media to health, from accountancy to tourism. This is an
extraordinarily far-reaching agreement; roughly two-thirds of the EU's
economy, for example, is in services. And GATS locks signatories into
enforced privatization of almost anything that could be deemed a
service.
Proposed 'new issues' being pushed by the rich countries to expand the
WTO's liberalization even before its current rules have been fully
negotiated are strongly opposed by developing country delegates.
Of particular concern is an investment agreement for which the EU has
been pushing hard, claiming that it will bring development benefits.
In fact, the major lobbyists for and beneficiaries of such an
investment agreement will be unprecedented new powers for
multinational corporations companies, who will gain greater 'rights to
roam' in the global economy.
Little reported, but arguably one of the most crucial aspects of the
negotiations at Cancun involve the status of international
environmental treaties such as the Montreal Protocol, which regulates
the production, consumption and export of substances which damage the
ozone layer, the Basel Convention which controls trade in hazardous
waste, and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which regulates trade
in genetically modified organisms.
The Committee on Trade and the Environment is focusing on whether
agreements like these are 'compatible' with existing WTO rules, and
their deliberations could endanger the status of many. The prospect of
the trade corpocracy decimating hard-won environmental agreements is
among the more depressing prospects on the cards.
But it is the liberalization of agriculture that is the make-or-break
issue for the trade-talks. Europe and the US refuse to remove
subsidies -which mostly benefit the wealthiest of their farmers and
agribusinesses- for their agricultural sectors, yet developing
countries have had to open up their own farming sectors. As a result,
poor farmers have to compete with goods from the US and the EU that
flood their markets at below the cost of production.
Developing countries, increasingly willing to unite and put up a fight
against the powerful countries, say they will refuse to agree to
anything else until this issue is resolved. These could be the rocks
upon which the WTO falters -for failure at Cancun could fatally damage
the credibility of the entire institution.
solomonkebede@yahoo.com
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Monday
September 29, 2003
