conclusion
The current system of global governance
is incoherent and unbalanced, and permits
the economic and trade priorities of the
biggest and most powerful countries and
companies to ride roughshod over all other
concerns within the WTO, regional free
trade agreements and even the United
Nations. This undermines and is preventing
effective international and even national
efforts to promote peace, human rights,
social progress and environmental
sustainability.
It is increasingly clear that trade
liberalization negotiations and rules have
a significant impact on biodiversity and a
wide range of natural resources, including
forests, fisheries and food, water and
minerals. Millions of impoverished people
around the world – those who are most
dependent upon natural resources or the
territories in which they are found – have
already lost or stand to lose their
livelihoods. This is most likely to happen
in those poorer countries that use
relatively high trade measures to protect
small farmers and fisherfolk and the
environment, as well as those that
currently enjoy preferential trade
agreements. International trade
liberalization agreements negotiated
without attention to these potential
impacts threaten to make poverty worse, not
better.
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The way we manage international
trade must change. Systems of
intergovernmental collaboration and
cooperation need to be transformed.
We require a coherent, coordinated
and more balanced form of global
governance that integrates peoples'
economic needs and the multilateral
regulation of trade with other
important social and environmental
concerns. International trade needs
to be recognized for what it is - a
means to an end – and the myth of
free trade as a solution to poverty
exploded.
Governments need to recognize the
importance of vibrant and sustainable
local economies, and to consistently
acknowledge the link between access
to natural resources and poverty
eradication. The environment cannot
be treated as an add-on option that
can be dealt with at some hazy point
in the future. We are destroying our
environment and impoverishing people
right now, and trade liberalization
negotiations are fuelling this
process.
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The World Trade Organization and
regional free trade agreements like the
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) are
already faltering. This is because they are
not delivering what people need. Trade
liberalization negotiations need to be
stopped and their objectives and impacts
independently reviewed. Our natural
heritage – including forests, fisheries,
food, minerals and water - must be
separated and protected from the entire
trade liberalization agenda. There should
be no question, for example, of sensitive
environmental sectors such as forests and
fisheries being included in the WTO's
nonagricultural market access (NAMA)
negotiations. Neither should energy and
water services be included in its services
agenda.
Governments must remain free to take
whatever measures they deem necessary,
including trade measures, to protect our
heritage effectively and improve the lives
of those people immediately dependent upon
it. To constrain such action on the basis
of shorttem – and inequitable - economic
priorities is absurd. In addition,
governments need to amend all relevant
international agreements so that
governments cannot be forced into
introducing intellectual property rights on
life forms. Farmers', indigenous peoples'
and local communities' rights to their
traditional resources and knowledge should
be fully protected.
Alternatives clearly exist and are
possible, as is shown in the pages of this
publication. Farmers in Colombia, for
example, are resisting the impact of cheap
imports by establishing their own local
markets. Workers in Uruguay have
successfully taken over and run an
economically successful mill that pays its
workers excellent wages, sources all its
inputs locally and nationally and has
encouraged farmers to reintroduce important
food security crops. In Canada, crab and
lobster fishing licenses are strictly
limited to individual fisherfolk with small
boats who are obliged to fish the licenses
themselves, creating 45,000 new rural
jobs.
New concepts are being developed as
well. Food and energy sovereignty, together
with water justice, are the new frameworks
within which civil society is beginning to
reorganize itself and its commerce, in
order to develop fair and sustainable
economies. Free trade has had its day.
Another world is possible – and necessary.
