Posted by WTO Watch Qld on May 2, 2003 at 20:18:13:
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Because food is RIGHT not a PRIVILEGE,
because POVERTY is a SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION,
because we have enough for everyone's NEED, not everyone's GREED,
because the money spent by the world on weapons in a WEEK is enough to feed everyone on earth for a YEAR,
Because we need FOOD not BOMBS
The 'Food Not Bombs' group, 15 October, 2001
1) CALLS TO ACTION
Calling all Queenslanders!
2) GATS UPDATE
a) Some submissions into Senate GATS inquiry now available
b) Government releases GATS offer
c) A Professional Disservice to the South
d) The Paradox of wealth transfer from poor to rich nations through manpower
3) FOCUS ON AGRICULTURE
a) The WTO and the World Food System...........Introduction
b) Guess who abstained from voting on the Right to Food?
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1) CALLS TO ACTION
ON LINE PETITION FOR QLD CITIZENS.....CALLING ALL QUEENSLANDERS
If we are to convince the Qld government that there is a lot of community concern about the GATS, then we need a VERY good response to this petition. So far, we haven't got a VERY good response. Signing on to this petition is a lot easier than writing a submission! Only Qld citizens may sign. The petition will be presented to the Qld parliament to coincide with the WTO ministerial in Cancun in September.
Please go to the link below to sign on and there you will find another link which enables you to forward the petition to your networks.
http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/Petitions/cgi-bin/Petitions.cgi?PetNum=148&PetType=1
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2) GATS UPDATE
a) The closing date for submissions into the Senate Inquiry into GATS and the US/Australia Free Trade Agreement has now passed and 30 submissions have been posted on the website. This has not been updated since February, so hopefully there will be a lot more than 30 posted eventually. See
http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/fadt_ctte/GATS/submissions/sublist.htm
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b) This is an extract from a report by AFTINET. The full report is available at www.aftinet.org
On 1 April the Government made its initial GATS offer public. The release of the offer is a response to the community pressure on the government, which was acknowledged in the Minister’s media release. This is an important victory. It is the first time that such offers have been publicly released, and so is an important step towards transparency in trade negotiations.
No new offers have been made on health, education, postal services, water for human use or audio visual services. There are no changes to the Foreign Investment Review Board or to the limitations on foreign investment in Telstra. This is again a result of community campaigning on these issues.
The offers are available on the DFAT website at
http://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/negotiations/gats_schedule_initial_offer_0303.doc
The explanatory notes to the offers which explain how to read the chart are at
http://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/negotiations/services/index.html
While we welcome this first step, there is still a long way to go on transparency and accountability because :
the public was only able to know the content of the offer after it had been lodged with the WTO in Geneva. We were seeking public discussion before it was lodged.
the offer is an initial offer only, subject to change at any time over the next 18 months of further negotiations. There should be a process of community consultation before any changes are made.
the government has not released its requests to other countries, which we have asked for. We do not know for example whether Australia has made requests about health, education or water to other countries, including developing countries.
there is still ambiguity in the definition of public services in the GATS. We are asking for all public services to be clearly excluded.
There is also a reference in the explanatory paper to the negotiations on GATS rules. This acknowledge that proposed changes to GATS rules on regulation and proposed changes to the definition of subsidies to include funding of public services could affect the ability of governments to regulate services and to provide and fund public services. The government is saying that it will support the right of governments "to regulate and to fund public services and not to support any new rules which cast doubt on that outcome." These negotiations are also held in secret and without changes to the process we will not know the result of these negotiations until after they are completed.
The new offers or changes in existing commitments in the Australian government offers include:
Environmental services
There are several new offers under environmental services. While ‘water for human use’ is not included in the offer, water is significant for a number of the newly added services, notably ‘remediation and cleanup of soil and water’ and ‘protection of biodiversity and landscape’. These services, together with "protection of ambient air and climate" and "noise and vibration abatement" are added to Australia’s offer without limitations on either market access or national treatment. Waste water management was already included in Australia’s schedule of previous commitments.
Financial services
The government claims that the changes in Australia's commitments in this sector reflect changes to financial regulation which have already occurred in domestic law. However, if they are part of the final GATS agreement, this will mean that Australia is bound to these changes and could expect penalties under the GATS rules if a future government wanted to change them.
Telecommunications services
The changes to Australia's existing commitments on numbers of satellite services and foreign investment in Optus and Vodafone only reflect changes in domestic regulation which have occurred since the previous negotiations. As noted above, there is no change to foreign ownership restrictions on Telstra.
Maritime services
There are additional offers on port services, including pilatage, towing and tug assistance and shore-based operational services.
There is no offer on cabotage, which is the regulation which provides for Australian coastal shipping to be done by Australian ships with local crews.
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The developing countries have a particular interest in Mode 4 of the GATS which allows workers to enter a foreign country on a temporary basis (usually from 3 to 6 months or perhaps longer) in order to work in a particular service sector. The money sent home from abroad by these workers makes up a significant proportion of the GDP of a number of developing countries and so far, there have been very few commitments made in Mode 4 by developed countries. There is, however, a downside to this arrangement.
c) A professional disservice to the South..............The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0327, page 2
David Batty
New Labour has staked its political future on modernising Britain's
public services. It pledged more than $160bn in last year's budget
and the comprehensive spending review to improve the state of
hospitals, schools and local government services.But the main
obstacle to achieving the government's ambitious goals is no longer
money: it is staff shortages.
Government ministers have launched a series of recruitment drives to
tackle a growing workforce crisis. Last year a target was set to
recruit an additional 15,000 doctors and 35,000 nurses, midwives and
health visitors by 2008.
To fill the gaps, employers are increasingly looking abroad. The
Department of Health (DoH) has launched a huge overseas recruitment
drive, attracting nurses from counties as diverse as Spain and the
Philippines. The bulk of the global recruitment market is controlled
by independent recruitment agencies, which have reported a sharp
upturn in demand in recent years.
There are now 42,000 foreign nurses working in Britain's health
service, more than double the number three years ago. Thousands of
foreign teachers have been recruited since 1997. More than 5,056
overseas doctors were registered to practice in the UK in 2001,
compared with 4,281 new home-grown recruits. A report by the Royal
College of Nursing reveals that Britain is now reliant on this
international workforce. It is cheaper and easier to hire overseas staff.
A similar situation is emerging in social services. At least 30
councils in southeast England are relying on overseas social workers
to staff their child protection teams. Half of the London boroughs
report that 10% of their social workers are foreigners, and almost
all plan to increase international recruitment.
However, the ethics of overseas recruitment are increasingly under
scrutiny. Following a plea by the former president of South Africa,
Nelson Mandela, the DoH banned some hospitals from recruiting nurses
from developing countries because many face staff shortages. But less
than a third of private recruitment agencies have signed up to the
guidelines. The number of South African nurses in Britain has risen
fivefold in four years.
Even those countries long considered to have a surplus of care staff
are now feeling the strain. Turnover at Philippine hospitals is so
high that many operating theatres are staffed with trainee nurses.
The crisis facing schools and social services in the developing world
is just as acute. Zimbabwe's department of social welfare has only an
eighth of the staff required to function effectively because more
than half of the country's 3,000 social workers now work in Britain.
And Jamaica lost 600 teachers, mainly to Britain and the United
States.
The Philippine board of nursing is pressing its government to make
foreign hospitals cover the costs of training recruits every time a
nurse is lost from the country. Britain's Commonwealth Secretariat
is drawing up a code of conduct on the recruitment of health and
social care staff following pressure from poorer member states.
Meanwhile New Zealand's education ministry has hired the same
agencies that lured its teachers to Britain to attract them back home.
But the main threat to Britain's supply of international public
services workers comes from the US where employers spend $10,000 on
hiring overseas nurses - more than twice as much as their UK
counterparts. The main teacher recruitment agency, Timeplan, says
that in 2003 the number of British teachers recruited to work in the
US will for the first time exceed the number of US teachers hired by
British schools. In this competitive global market the only
guaranteed beneficiaries will be the recruitment agencies.
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d) Paradox of wealth transfer from poor to rich nations through manpower
"Conservative estimates by Wilma Meeus and David
Sanders at the University of the Western Cape's School
of Public Health show that the United States has saved
at least U$3,86-million (R30,9 million) in training
fees by employing doctors from Nigeria which has lost
21,000 doctors to the superpower. Nigeria in turn
incurred a loss of U$420 million (R3,4 million)."
To learn about the paradox of wealth transfer from
poor to rich nations through manpower, visit:
Rich countries deplete Africa's medical resources
http://news.hst.org.za/view.php3?id=20030411
A. Odutola
Centre for Health Policy & Strategic Studies (CHPSS)
Lagos, Nigeria
Mailto: chpss_abo@yahoo.com
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CHPSS works to promote better health in Nigeria and the rest of Africa through research, policy advocacy and information dissemination.
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3) FOCUS ON AGRICULTURE
It is time for WTO Watch to bite the bullet and tackle the vexed question of agriculture and the WTO. The Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) is possibly the most contentious of the WTO agreements. It is a sector in which Australia has a particular interest because the perceived need to increase market access for our agricultural produce is a major driver of our trade policy. But even among members of civil society there is little agreement on the way in which agriculture should be dealt with.....or indeed, if it should be dealt with in the WTO at all. The next few bulletins will focus on agriculture, both from an Australian and a international perspective.
a) The WTO and the World Food System.....Introduction
Making sense of the world food system today is both easy and complex. It is easy if we consider the importance of food in sustaining human life.
Everyone needs food; access to adequate, safe and nutritious food is a fundamental human right. Some 1.3 billion people are actively engaged
in agricultural production, with the agricultural sector employing half of the world’s labour force. This includes 450 million waged agricultural workers.
In developing countries agricultural workers constitute the majority of the workforce, reaching as high as 80 percent in some countries.
Women account for more than half of the world’s waged agricultural labour force, and 70 percent of all child labour is employed in agriculture.
The majority of working people engaged in agricultural production are involved in the production of food. According to the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), rural women are responsible for half of the world’s food production and between 60 to 80 percent in most developing countries.
All agricultural workers and small farmers are both producers and consumers of food, and their livelihood is tied to the livelihoods of those who consume
the food they produce. This is a simple but fundamental link in the world food system.
A common sense approach to understanding the world food system raises some basic questions.
If access to safe, nutritious food is a fundamental human right, why are 820 million people living in hunger today? Why are people in food exporting
countries living in hunger, and why are agricultural workers among the malnourished?
If the value of annual global exports in agricultural products is USD 545 billion, why do waged agricultural workers and small farmers register among the highest levels of global poverty?
More than half of the world’s workforce is engaged in agricultural production. Why then are the conditions under which food is produced so destructive to the health and well-being of these people? According to the ILO at least 170,000 agricultural workers are killed every year as a result of workplace accidents. Agricultural workers are twice as likely to die at work than workers in any other sector. Among these fatalities are an annual 40,000 deaths from exposure to pesticides. Every year an estimated three to four million people engaged in agricultural work suffer severe poisoning, including work-related cancer and reproductive impairments, from the hazardous pesticides they are forced to use.
Only five percent of the world’s 1.3 billion agricultural workers have access to any kind of labour inspection system or legal protection of their health and safety rights. Yet the agenda of corporate globalization aggressively promoted by agencies like the World Trade Organization (WTO) seeks greater deregulation and less social protection.
Following what the WTO calls "the setback in Seattle" in 1999, the Fourth WTO Ministerial meeting in Doha (November 9-15, 2001) launched a new round of trade liberalization. The winners of this new ‘Doha Development Round’ are clearly the transnational corporations (TNCs) that dominate the global economy. This includes the agricultural and food processing industries, where mergers and acquisitions have seen the centralization of control in the hands of a few global corporations.
Corporations supplying seeds have merged with agrochemical and biotechnology companies, effectively reshaping the world food system. The president of Monsanto’s seed division, Robert Fraley, says "This is not just a consolidation of seed companies, but really a consolidation of the entire food chain."
It is through this control of the entire food chain that corporations like Du Pont can claim – in its "to do list for the planet" – a simple task: "feed the planet." What this really means is that people are less able to feed themselves without corporate giants like Du Pont as they become more dependent on the products and production
methods of TNCs. In this sense, the food chain is locked and the TNCs hold the key. This is the direction corporate globalization is taking us, and the new round of WTO trade talks will take us there more quickly.
These are not philosophical questions or reflections on the morality of our times. They are some of the most basic political questions that must be asked about the system we live in. They in turn raise another basic question: If these are the most serious problems facing billions of people today, why does the WTO work so hard to exacerbate them? Hunger and malnutrition, food security and sustainable agriculture were sidelined as "non-trade issues" in the final WTO Ministerial Declaration. The conditions of work in the agricultural sector were ignored altogether.
Instead of serious attempts to deal with these problems, the trade talks focused on how to increase the pressure on agricultural workers and small farmers to become more competitive, and how to expose them more fully to a volatile, fluctuating market. This is the same market that has displaced and impoverished hundreds of thousands of small farmers and agricultural workers faced with falling prices for coffee, sugar and other agricultural products. While hunger and the need for millions of people to gain access to food is one of the biggest challenges we face, the WTO agenda gives priority to gaining "market access" in ways that consolidate corporate power and profit in the agrifood industry.
In 1996 the World Food Summit announced its plan to halve world hunger by 2015. Yet in the WTO trade talks more urgent deadlines were drawn up for expanding global agribusiness. While the deadline for halving world hunger is 15 years away, the deadline for more rapid market liberalization in agriculture is to be achieved in 15 months – with new commitments planned for the Fifth WTO Ministerial in Mexico in mid-2003.
Hunger and malnutrition only enter the picture when the problem can be redefined to benefit agribusiness. In the months leading up to the WTO Ministerial in Doha, US President Bush declared: "I want America to feed the world. We’re missing some great opportunities, not only in our hemisphere, but around the world." In this way a global humanitarian crisis and the large-scale violation of people’s right of access to adequate, safe and nutritious food is redefined as a business opportunity. Among those to be "fed by America" (i.e. US agribusiness) are the small farmers and agricultural workers around the world whose livelihood was destroyed by competition, declining commodity prices, debt and displacement resulting from the dumping of under-priced produce by corporate agribusiness and dependence on over-priced fertilizers and seed. Moreover, the 30 million people in the US who live in hunger – including over four million malnourished people living in the food-exporting state of California – know that only when their hunger is a business opportunity will "America feed America."
For the US government feeding the world’s hungry and promoting US agricultural exports are one and the same. As Bush declared, "It starts with having an administration committed to knocking down barriers to trade, and we are."
What are these "barriers", how are they "knocked down" and what are the consequences?
Shortly after the WTO meeting in Doha, the US Secretary of Agriculture, Ann M. Veneman, stated clearly that these "barriers" include any efforts by governments to protect public health by ensuring that consumers have the right to choose not to consume GMO food products. In particular, Veneman criticized the EU’s move to strictly regulate GMO foods and impose compulsory labeling of GMO food products. Like other forms of environmental and social protection, restrictions on GMOs are seen as "barriers" that must be knocked down or prevented from being erected in the first place. In the same speech Veneman reaffirmed that "…non-trade issues cannot be allowed to undermine key WTO provisions or divert us from our primary goal."
That goal is not to ensure the universal right to adequate, safe and nutritious food, or to promote sustainable agriculture that supports the livelihood of millions, but to create "global agriculture." Under this global vision, "future agriculture policies must be market-oriented … they must integrate agriculture into the global economy, not insulate us from it."
It is in this context that the WTO Agreement on Agriculture and the Agreements on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) play a central role in breaking down barriers and consolidating global corporate domination of the world food system.
Regardless of differences in views on when and how to liberalize agriculture and promote the interests of agribusiness, the majority of governments represented at the WTO meeting in Doha tacitly support the US government’s vision of a market-oriented and commercialized "global agriculture." With a few exceptions, the main disputes among trade negotiators concerned who gets what share of the profits from "global agriculture", not the violation of the rights of working
people in the destructive process of globalizing agriculture.
This vision of "global agriculture" fails to recognize the social and environmental crises which are built into the current world food system and their enormous cost in human lives. Significantly, the rights and livelihood of the millions of agricultural and food processing workers, subsistence farmers and marginalized/small farmers
on whose labour this entire system is based are ignored altogether.
From 'The WTO and the World Food System'. www.iuf.org
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b) Guess who abstained from the vote on the Right to Food?
Date: Wed Apr 23, 2003 08:16:43 US/Pacific
Subject: UNCHR: Canada votes in favour of Right to Food
Below, find a press release from the
office of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Zeigler.
April 23, 2003
In a resolution on the right to food (E/CN.4/2003/L.27), adopted in a
roll-call vote of 51 in favour and 1 against, with 1 abstention, the
Commission encouraged all States to take steps with a view to achieving
progressively the full realization of the right to food, including steps to
promote the conditions for everyone to be free from hunger and as soon as
possible enjoy fully the right to food, as well as to elaborate and adopt
national plans to combat hunger; and took note with interest the report of
the Special Rapporteur on the right to food.
The results of the vote were as follows:
In favour (51): Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium,
Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Croatia,
Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, France, Gabon, Germany, Guatemala,
India, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Malaysia, Mexico,
Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation,
Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan,
Swaziland, Sweden, Syrian Arab Republic, Thailand, Togo, Uganda, Ukraine,
United Kingdom, Uruguay, Venezuela, Viet Nam and Zimbabwe.
Against (1): United States.
Abstention (1): Australia.
A Representative of the United States said his delegation could not support
the resolution on the right to food. His Government was the largest donor
of food aid in the world. His Government's commitment to provide food and
end hunger was unquestionable. His Government could not in any way endorse
the work of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler.
Instead, he should be reprimanded for his irresponsible statements and for
abusing his mandate. His delegation would request for recorded vote and
would vote against the text.
A Representative of Canada said it supported the progressive realization of
the right to food and was therefore in a position to support the draft
resolution.
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Terrie Templeton WTO Watch Qld gumbus@powerup.com.au