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WTO UPDATES:
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Derail DOHA, Save the Climate*
By Akbayan Representative Walden Bello

There’s something surreal about the ongoing World Trade Organization talks in Geneva, which aim at coming up with a new agreement to bring down tariffs in order to expand world trade and resuscitate global growth. In the face of the looming specter of climate change, these negotiations amount to arguing over the arrangement of deck chairs while the Titanic is sinking.

Indeed, one of the most important steps in the struggle to come up with a viable strategy to deal with climate change would be the derailment of the so-called “Doha Round.”

Global trade is carried out with transportation that is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. It’s estimated that about 60% of the world’s use of oil goes to transportation activities which are more than 95% dependent on fossil fuels. An OECD study estimated that the global transport sector accounts for 20-25% of carbon emissions, with some 66% of this figure accounted for by emissions in the industrialized countries.

Global Trade: Deeply Dysfunctional

From the point of view of environmental sustainability, global trade has become deeply dysfunctional. Take agricultural trade. As the International Forum on Globalization has pointed out, the average plate of food eaten in Western industrial food-importing nations is likely to have traveled 1,500 miles from its source. Long-distance travel contributes to the absurd situation wherein “three times more food is used to produce food in the industrial agricultural model than is derived in consuming it.”

The WTO has been a central factor in increasing carbon emissions from transport. A study by the OECD done in the mid-nineties estimated that by 2004, the year marking the full implementation of free-trade commitments under the WTO’s Uruguay Round, there would have been an increase in the transport of internationally traded goods by 70% over 1992 levels. This figure, notes the New Economics Foundation, “would make a mockery” of the Kyoto Protocol’s mandatory emissions reduction targets for the industrialized countries.

Transportation: More Fossil Intensive than Ever

Ocean shipping accounts for nearly 80% of the world’s international trade in goods. The fuel commonly used by ships is a mixture of diesel and low-quality oil known as “Bunker C,” which has high levels of carbon and sulfur. As Jerry Mander and Simon Retallack point out, “If not consumed by ships, it would otherwise be considered a waste product.”

Aviation, which has the highest growth rate as a mode of transport, is also the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, with its consumption of fuel expected to rise by 65% from 1990 levels by 2010, according to one study cited by the New Economics Foundation. Other estimates are more pessimistic, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggesting that fuel consumption by civil aviation is going up at the rate of three percent a year and could rise by nearly 350% from 1992 levels by 2050. Note Mander and Retallack: “Each ton of freight moved by plane uses forty nine times as much energy per kilometer as when it’s moved by ship….A two-minute takeoff by a 747 is equal to 2.4 million lawn mowers running for twenty minutes.” In support of trade expansion and global economic growth, authorities have by and large not taxed aviation fuel as well as marine bunker fuel, which now account for 20% of all emissions in the transport sector.

Along with fossil-fuel-intensive air transport, fossil-fuel-intensive road transport has also been favored by the expansion of world trade, instead of modes with less emission intensities like rail and marine traffic. In the European Union, for instance, the focus on building up a road transport network led an OECD study to comment that “the way in which the EU liberalization policy has been implemented has favored the less environment-friendly modes and accelerated the decline of rail and inland waterways.”

Decoupling Growth and Energy: a Panacea

There has been talk about decoupling trade and growth from energy or shifting from fossil fuels to other, less carbon-intensive energy sources. The reality is that the other energy sources being seriously considered are either dangerous, like nuclear power; with deleterious side-effects, like biofuels’ negative impact on food production; or science fiction as this stage, like carbon sequestration and storage technology. For the foreseeable future, trade expansion and global growth will fall in line with their historical trajectory of being correlated with increased greenhouse gas emissions.

A sharp U-turn in consumption and growth in the developed countries and a significant decrease in global trade are unavoidable if we are to have a viable strategy against climate change. This will set the stage for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, including from the energy-intensive transportation sector. The outcome of the Doha negotiations will determine whether free trade will intensify or lose momentum. A successful conclusion to Doha will bring us closer to uncontrollable climate change. It will continue what the New Economics Foundation describes as “free trade’s free ride on the global climate.”

A derailment of Doha won’t be a sufficient condition to formulate a strategy to contain climate change. But given the likely negative ecological consequences of a successful deal, it’s a necessary condition.
http://focusweb.org/derail-doha-save-the-climate.html?Itemid=1
* First published in Foreign Policy In Focus

LEAVING THE WTO BEHIND:
Impasse: Are We Nearing the End of the Corporate Globalization Era?
By Deborah James, AlterNet. August 21, 2008.

The failure to expand the WTO shows that the ideology of "free trade" has lost its luster. When the history of the seismic shifts occurring today in the global economy is written, the failure in July 2008 of corporate interests and some governments to expand the World Trade Organization (WTO) through the Doha Round will stand as a watershed moment.
READ FULL ARTICLE AT:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/globaliz...

IS THE WTO DEAD?
Will WTO, like Dracula, Come Back from the Dead?

By Walden Bello and Mary Lou Malig

It was the synergy between the massive protests in the streets and the rebellion of developing countries at the Sheraton Convention Center that resulted in the spectacular collapse of the Third Ministerial Meeting in Seattle in 1999. Like the good Count of Transylvania, the so-called Doha Round of trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization collapsed twice--the first time during the Cancun Fifth Ministerial Meeting in September 2003, the second during the so-called Group of Four meeting in Potsdam in June 2007--only to come back from the dead. But has the silver stake that will render the WTO truly and really dead finally been driven through its heart by the unraveling of the most recent “mini-ministerial” gathering in Geneva?
READ FULL ARTICLE AT:
http://focusweb.org/will-doha-like-dracula-come-back-from-the-dead.html?...

CURRENT GLOBAL JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS & NETWORKS

INTERNATIONAL:
Peoples' Global Action
www.agp.org/

Focus on the Global South; WTO Updates and Analysis
http://www.focusweb.org/trade-campaign/24.html?Itemid=73

Third World Network – Global South based research, analysis and activism
http://www.twnside.org.sg/

Via Campesina – The International farmers' organization – grassroots analysis and mobilization. Support farmers' grass roots Tsunami relief [do we want to keep this?], or mobilization against the WTO.
http://viacampesina.org

Dissent Network
http://dissentnetzwerk.org

NORTH AMERICA
Grassroots Global Justice
http://www.ggjalliance.org/

Indymedia
http://www.indymedia.org/en/index.shtml

National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights http://www.nnirr.org/

Critical Resistance
http://www.criticalresistance.org/

International Forum on Globalization
http://www.ifg.org/

Public Citizen – Global Trade Watch?
http://www.citizen.org/trade/

Global Exchange
http://www.globalexchange.org/

Council of Canadians
http://www.canadians.org/

Oakland Institute
http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/

Community Alliance for Global Justice (Seattle)
http://www.seattleglobaljustice.org

RESOURCES

FILMS/VIDEOS

A World Without the WTO
Focus on the Global South presents life without the WTO. This provocative and inspiring video answers questions about life in a post-WTO era and invites you to imagine a world without the WTO.
http://www.focusweb.org/a-world-without-the-wto.html?Itemid=30

This is What Democracy Looks Like
http://www.thisisdemocracy.org/

Showdown in Seattle
http://deepdishtv.org/Series/Default.aspx?id=45
http://www.whisperedmedia.org/showdown.html
Showdown in Seattle is a five part series that features an on-the-ground, non-corporate perspective and analysis you won't find anywhere else, in addition to incredible footage of police repression and popular resistance. Each half hour show is made up of segments produced by an unprecedented collaboration of video artists and activists from around the U.S. working under the umbrella of the Independent Media Center.

INDYMEDIA; SHOCKING & AWFULL
The Shocking and Awful series is the document of the events that came out of that first Indymedia center. Over 100 Videographers contributed footage, and 30 minutes of programming was produced daily, uplinked to satellite, and rebroadcast by approximately 75 public access stations around the country, as well as on Free Speech TV. You can check out all the programs at deepdishtv.org. Search the catalogue for Showdown in Seattle, and "view program details."
It was one of the most incredible weeks of my life, in all honestly. It changed me forever. --MARK READ

WTO Music Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzC1-NXu8Yw

A People’s History of the WTO
http://www.peopleshistory.net/

FLYERS:
Top Reasons to Oppose the WTO
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/wto/OpposeWTO.html

GAMES
The Game of the WTO: Arcade Game
http://www.globalarcade.org/wto/index.html

BOOKS
About Seattle/WTO:

Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization (Duke University Press)
By Jeffrey S. Juris
http://www.networkingfutures.com

Voices from the WTO; An anthology of writings by the people who shut down the world trade organization in Seattle in 1999.
Edited By Stephanie Guilloud (The Evergreen State College)

We Are Everywhere; Notes From Nowhere (Verso)
http://www.weareeverywhere.org/

The Battle of Seattle; The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization
Edited by Eddie Yuen, George Katsifacas and Daniel Burton Rose
(Note; A new edition has called Confronting Capitalism has come out which has less Seattle-related articles) Soft Skull Press

Webs of Power; Notes from The Global Uprising
By Starhawk (New Society Publishers)
http://www.starhawk.org/writings/webspower.html

Globalize This! The Battle Against the World Trade Organization and Corporate Rule
Edited by Kevin Danaher and Roger Burbach