Nairobi civil society declaration on the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)

 

29 May 2003

 

 

 

Civil society groups from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, Canada and New Zealand met in Nairobi from 27 – 29 May 2003 to study, analyse and exchange views on the impact of neo-liberal globalization specially on the south manifesting itself in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the forthcoming WTO Ministerial Conference in Cancun.

 

WTO is not just about imports and exports of goods, but increasingly is encroaching on people’s democratic control over and access to resources and on governments’ abilities to regulate social and economic policies and formulate human development. 

 

The GATS represents a powerful and totally unacceptable instrument that limits policy space and restricts popular access to services which are essential to people’s livelihoods and economic development.

 

African and developing countries are being forced through GATS to adopt policies that have had negative impacts on people and communities. GATS-type liberalization in sectors such as water in South Africa and Ghana, electricity in Indonesia and California, public broadcasting services in New Zealand, rail in the UK and financial liberalization that caused the crisis in East and South-East Asia are real experiences that disprove the alleged benefits put forward by the proponents of neo-liberalism, i.e. IMF, World Bank, WTO, donor agencies and corporate interests.

 

We civil society organisations oppose GATS, existing commitments and attempts to adopt further commitments.

 

We therefore call upon developing governments to:

 

  1. share all necessary information and documents, and work with their civil society to develop policies that meet the needs of their citizens.
  2. to promote, protect and reclaim the southern policy space, to review, with a view to withdraw, current commitments and therefore not to make any new commitments in current GATS negotiations. There is no evidence to prove that GATS will attract productive investment. On the contrary, the developing countries lose whatever little share they currently have.
  3. to share relevant information among themselves and to work together in order to increase their negotiation capacity to avoid being bullied in multilateral and bi-lateral forums.

 

Further to this, we call upon northern governments to stop manipulating and abusing bilateral and multilateral processes.

 

We commit ourselves to continue building global solidarity in our common struggle against corporate-driven, northern imposed policy agendas. We also reaffirm our commitment to networking amongst ourselves in order to make sure that our governments protect the interests of their people.

 

 

Signatories:

 

Action Aid, Uganda

Alternative Information and Development Centre, South Africa

ARENA, New Zealand

Business Watch, Indonesia

Center for International Environmental Law, Switzerland

Consumer Information Network, Kenya

EcoNews Africa, Kenya

11.11.11, Belgium

Equations, India

Food Rights Alliance, Uganda

Gender and Trade Network in Africa

Institute for Global Justice, Indonesia

Institute of Economic Affairs, Kenya

International Gender and Trade Network – Asia

Lawyers Environmental Action Team, Tanzania

MWENGO, Zimbabwe

Polaris Institute, Canada

REBRIP, Brazil

SEATINI, Uganda

SEATINI, Zimbabwe

SodNet, Kenya

Tanzania Gender and Networking Programme, Tanzania

Third World Network Africa, Ghana

Trade Watch, Kenya

World Development Movement, UK