"How do you feel about your public
services?
Would you like them to stay public?
Or would you prefer it if they were
forcibly prised open to foreign corporate competition by way of a new
international law?
All in the name of trade, of
course."
-
Paul Kingsnorth, The Ecologist.
Modalities. Appellate bodies. Singapore
issues. Single undertakings.
Welcome to the dictionary of the World
Trade Organization (WTO) who' ve been busy inventing their own language to bore
us all into submission and pull the wool over our eyes so we just don't see
their plans for the corporate carve up of the planet.
Last weekend nearly 200,000 people in
France saw through this fog of language and took part in a weekend rally
against the WTO, whose fifth ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico is less than
a month away.
For the past few years, the WTO have been
trying to expand its snappily titled General Agreement on Trades in Services
(or GATS), whose "privatize everything!" small print is a wet dream
for corporations.
The EU is using GATS to target everything
from public healthcare, welfare, water, energy and transport networks in the
developing world as its new golden goose.
Its 109 'requests' for developing
countries was a strictly classified document that got leaked onto the web. But
why do they want to keep it a secret?
One of those requests from the EU is that
72 developing countries make commitments to open up their water supplies to
competition.
The effects of this would be disastrous
for the world's poor.
Take Brazil for example.
In Porto Allegre, the local water company
DMAE is publicly owned, and financially independent from state control thanks
to water bills paid by the 1.4 million city inhabitants.
All profits are re-invested in the water
supply, and through public meetings, everyone can have their say in what they
think should be priority.
This participatory model has been a
massive success. 99.5% of the city's population now have access to clean water
- the highest rate in Brazil. Overall consumption has gone down while the water
rates are some of the lowest in the country.
But under GATS if the Brazilian
government imposed legal requirements for all water companies to act like DMAE
it would be a 'barrier to trade' and illegal.
In the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, a
proposed privatization was strongly opposed by the water workers' union, so the
Dhaka Water Authority contracted out one zone to the union, while another zone was
given to a private water company for a year's trial.
The union co-operative's results were so
much better that they won the contract.
Many more people now have access to
running water and there has been a sizable reduction in water losses. But
should the Government of Bangladesh give in to the EU's request then if any of
their policies tried to expand the cooperative model they would likely to be in
violation of GATS rules.
The city of Santa Cruz in Bolivia boasts
one of the best-run water companies in Latin America and the only
not-for-profit co-op in the world responsible for water supply and sanitation
in a major urban centre. The EU is requesting that Bolivia put its water
supplies under GATS rules. Should they agree then the promotion and implementation
of these alternative models elsewhere in Bolivia would be illegal.
In Panama strikes and demonstrations in
1998 forced the then president to back down on plans to privatize the national
water company and in Trinidad the UK water company Severn Trent, were kicked
out of the country after 5 years after they'd put prices up while providing a
worsening service.
The Bolivian mountain city of Cochabamba
was also the setting for an epic struggle for control of the water supply in
early 2000.
Thousands protested at the sell-off of
the city's water system to the US multinational Bechtel, who raised water bills
by up to 300 per cent and required people to get a permit to collect rainwater
in rooftop tanks. Eventually massive
protests drove the corporation out and led to the water system being taken back
into public ownership -an unprecedented reversal of a major privatization.
So what would happen now if the Bolivian
government decides to open up all its water services to corporate competition?
Well the WTO has learnt that whenever governments try to sell off essential services
they have faced mass protests. So they've come up with the GATS trump card -
that once a service has been 'liberalized' (that's WTO talk for privatization)
there's no going back. As the WTO
website once put it, GATS helps to "overcome domestic resistance to
change."
Which means even if there is massive
protests or a government wants to take back control from a failing private
company, it won 't be able to unless it is ready to face the trade sanction consequences.
And this is the key thing to grasp: this
is not about 'trade' at all; it's about power and who gets it. Governments or
corporations? Ordinary people or profiteers? The answers to those questions
will affect all of our lives."
Time we started reminding them of the
language of the street protest.
* Join the protests to derail the talks
www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/cancun
* Decode the gobbledegook - the World Development Movement has loads of excellent resources on GATS 020 72747630 www.wdm.org.uk