Bali, Indonesia
December 1-6, 2013
END WTO! With this joint call from Gerak Lawan and the Social Movements for an Alternative Asia (SMAA) new energy and momentum has been regained by social movements and civil society organisations in the preparations for the Bali Week of Action whether in preparation for participation in Bali or in different countries across the world. It is not only the WTO and its agreements that is on the agenda in Bali, it also includes the current raft of FTAs and BITs which form part of the same architecture of free trade and investment serving corporate interests and imperatives above the interests of the people and the planet. This entire architecture operates as a new global constitution for Transnational Corporations and will be strongly rejected in Bali.
WTO Ministerial Bali – the G20 vs the G33
The WTO Bali Ministerial Conference (MC9) is the first time in eight years that it will be held outside of Geneva. The last time was also in Asia and it was held in Hong Kong and many will remember that Ministerial inHong Kong came close to ending in a breakdown.
Global geopolitics will dominate the Bali Ministerial. The key question is if the G22 pushed by the US and the EU will be able to achieve ever steeper liberalisation demands in the areas of intellectual property rights and investments or if the G33 will salvage anything of the Doha Development Round which includes the Bali Package or early harvest package of agreements on a number of proposals – on trade facilitation, on agriculture, on LDCs and development. The question is whether the Bali Ministerial will deliver on an early harvest agreement aimed to revive the Doha Round or will this be set permanently aside. Whatever the outcome, the new WTO Director General, Brazilian Azevedo as well as the powerful rich country governments and the transnational corporations whose interests are most served in the WTO will be pushing for even steeper demands in the liberalisation of global trade and investment while claiming to make the WTO a 21st century institution.
TNI and the Global Campaign to Dismantle Corporate Power
The Campaign is participating in the core activities of the Bali Week of Action – in the Economic Justice Assembly, presenting the Peoples Treaty and its strategies to Dismantle Corporate Power and end impunity of TNCs. It will also present a case at the Peoples Tribunal of the WTO, FTAs and BITs indicating the complicity of states with corporate interests and the surrender of national sovereignty. A report has been jointly published by TNI and SPI – Tailored for Sharks which presents the evidence on why the WTO and its Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM( is a powerful corporate weapon privileging corporate interests of transnational capital.
