Figures on stilts, dressed as managers of DuPont, Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta, the world's largest agro-multinational, tag patent clips on plants and seeds around a three-meter globe.
Why is the WTO a problem?
The WTO is a tool of the rich and powerful. By placing trade
above all other goals, it threatens our health and the environment.
Its more powerful members use arm-twisting tactics to push
developing countries into making bad deals. And it's being used by
corporate interests and the US to force-feed the world genetically
engineered food.
It's controlled by the rich and
powerful
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) essentially protects
multinational corporations based in the North and acts as a tool of
rich and powerful countries - notably the US, the EU, Japan and
Canada.
Although the majority of other WTO members are developing
countries from Africa, Asia/Pacific and Latin America, many of them
have little say in decisions that are taken at WTO meetings. They
don't have enough to offer from an economic standpoint to have any
real power.
Many of these countries are not even invited to key meetings,
which are invitation-only (although no one knows exactly how these
invitations are handed out, since this is done in a completely
non-transparent way). Find out more about the
secretive and undemocratic nature of the WTO and how decisions
are taken.
It is strongly influenced by narrow
corporate interests
Corporations are driven by the bottom line - profit.
Environmental, social and development concerns are distant
priorities, and tend to be a corporate focus only when they bring
commercial advantage. Given this narrow agenda, the trend of
powerful business lobbies influencing government positions at the
WTO is worrying.
It is not just in
the case of genetically engineered food, where you can see a
corporate lobby group influencing government positions. In fact,
this is the norm.
The US has also blocked an agreement at the WTO that promised
developing countries access to vital medicines - even though WTO
member countries already agreed to this in Doha in 2001. The reason
is that the agreement on the table threatens to cost its
pharmaceutical companies lost revenues in the billions.
And it is not just the US: the European Union (EU) is under
great pressure from the agricultural industry to maintain its huge
subsidy programme.
The EU is also looking to expand markets for its huge drinking
water companies under the WTO agreement on services. Even though
freshwater resources are drying up, the EU has been pushing a
corporate agenda, not one that works for the environment and
development.
The list goes on and on. Where WTO agreements can bring profit
to big industry groups, those groups go to work on their
governments to make sure that the most advantageous agreement is
negotiated for them.
More information
How does the WTO affect you?
View the slideshow