Multinational corporations

Here in the UK, the review of legislation on dangerous dogs has caught media attention – how some dogs are being bred as weapons to intimate others and at times have attacked vulnerable people like children. It’s a strange analogy, and one which I probably would not have made myself, but this morning European campaigners wanted to make a point that EU trade policy is like a dangerous dog - it’s predatory, aggressive and dangerous to the poorest people in the world.
 

The S2B group of campaigners staged a media stunt outside a trade conference on ‘EU trade policy towards developing countries’ hosted by the European trade commission. A five-metre high inflated savage dog, representing EU trade policy, was let off its lead by a giant business official, attacking victims representing small farmers, small businesses, women and indigenous people from the developing world.

The S2B network, which WDM is a member of, criticised the conference as a poor attempt to wrap a dangerous corporate trade agenda in development rhetoric. Current trade policies benefit European multinationals helping them to reap more profits but threaten the livelihoods of small farmers and...

Earlier this week, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) announced a new programme to support teaching on trade policy and ‘WTO-related matters’ in universities in developing countries. This programme would fund teaching, research and outreach on trade issues à la WTO.

The current Doha round is in its painful ninth year and the failure to come to a conclusion has been testament to the growing resistance of civil society and developing country governments to the bullying tactics at the WTO where rich countries have sought to fiercely promote corporate interests.

The WTO has made gains in opening up markets in developing countries but they want more. They are upping their game: If you can’t always get your way with negotiators from developing countries, why not groom some instant advocates in key countries, through a programme to indoctrinate, sorry I mean influence, a generation of potential policymakers and trade experts in the ways of the WTO?

This strategy bears uncanny resemblance to the 1957 US funded programme for Chilean students to study Economics at the University of Chicago, as cited by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, in the hope of challenging the socialist regime back home. Chicago was, of course, home to Milton Friedman and these students were...

MEPs fired questions at the new European trade commissioner Karel de Gucht in a European Parliamentary hearing last week (12 January).

Unsurprisingly De Gucht listed his priorities as: Concluding the WTO Doha round, bilateral trade deals and completing Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) - sticking closely to the predatory path mapped out by his predecessors Peter Mandelson and Baroness Catharine Ashton.

De Gucht was keen to tout his development credentials as the former development commissioner and confirmed his commitment to Doha with the usual rhetoric that free trade will help the poor. However this was called into question when De Gucht was challenged over the massive job losses and industrial destruction that proposed EU trade deals would cause in poorer countries and that pushing for more market access was really about generating superprofits for European big business. De Gucht was evasive and unable to deny that development was being sacrificed for corporate interest and instead gave a cursory answer about trade policy being a vehicle to project European values about human rights and climate change.
 

Carrying on the thread of corporate interest in European policy making, Caroline Lucas (Green MEP from UK) expressed concern at the...

Yesterday afternoon the Guardian published a comment piece by WDM's policy officer Tim Jones and Nick Dearden from Jubilee Debt Campaign about what's going on in Copenhagen and the repression of activists outside who are demanding climate justice. A letter by a wider group of organisations including us was also published in the print newspaper today.

Copenhagen: the sound of silence

Denmark's reputation is being destroyed by police action outside the summit and the gagging of NGOs and poor nations inside
Nick Dearden and Tim Jones

The problem the Danish government faces gets bigger by the hour. Clearly the government is desperate for the UN climate summit in Copenhagen to be seen as a success, regardless of whether the deal done is capable of slowing down climate change in a just way. But it is faced with an ever-swelling army of critics who believe this issue is too important for a stitched-up compromise, negotiated late at night between corporate lobbyists and rich-country governments in conference hotel rooms.

Read the full article on the Guardian's Comment is Free

Letter: Protest curtailed in Copenhagen

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We set off early from Lille, where we had been hosted by members of the Confederation Paysanne. We have had an incredibly warm welcome in all the places we’ve stayed, and Lille was no exception. Everyone from the caravan was put up by someone from the Confederation in their home, and we left early on Sunday morning well fed and well rested.

This was just as well, because from Lille we travelled to Brussels where we were being hosted by the Corporate Europe Observatory, an organisation campaigning against corporate lobbying and influence within EU policy. They had an action packed agenda ready for us, and we soon set of for an activist’s tour of Brussels...

Our first stop was the European Commission. The Commission is heavily influenced by corporate lobbyists who have been successful in pushing through aggressive trade agreements and flawed climate policies which favour high carbon industry, intensify the exploitation of natural resources and discriminate against developing countries. The EU’s climate policy is mainly based on carbon trading and other false solutions that benefit big business without tackling climate change.
 

We were joined there by...

The Trade to Climate Caravan

Organised by Klimaforum (www.klimaforum09.org)

From the WTO meetings in Geneva to the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, the Trade to Climate Caravan is taking the social and climate justice message through Europe, direct to the policy makers.

Activists from social and environmental struggles all over the world have come together to tell the politicians, the lobbyists and the multinationals that we demand system change, not climate change. The caravan has brought together campaigers and activists from throughout the global south; people who are suffering directly as a result of unjust and exploitative trade agreements, environmental devastation including destructive 'environmental' mega projects, and the socially reprehensible behaviour of governments as they resort to violence to evict people from their lands and pave the way or multinational corporations and agribusiness.

So, from Colombia to the Congo, the Phillippines to Mexico, Belarus to South Korea, and India to Peru, southern activists have come together in the run up to the UN Climate Summit to demand that the politicians and corporations stop polluting the poor for profit. This blog is devoted to sharing the messages and stories of those on the caravan as I...

Tim Jones

In Trinidad on Friday Gordon Brown got some headline coverage for his latest announcement of billions of dollars for developing countries to tackle climate change.

The prime minister became as expert as a derivatives trader in repackaging, reselling and reannouncing money when he was chancellor. Unfortunately the latest ‘news’ was no exception.

Mr Brown said rich countries should be creating a ‘Copenhagen launch fund’ worth $10 billion (£6 billion) to help developing countries adapt to climate change and develop in a low carbon way from 2010 to 2012. Let’s not get hung up on that amount as he wasn’t actually saying the UK would write a cheque.

What Gordon Brown did say was that “the UK Government would contribute £800 million in total over three years, which has already been budgeted for”. In fact it was budgeted for in the budget in 2007. The prime minister should know; he was chancellor at the time.

The same £800 million has been reannounced so many times since it’s enough to make you dizzy.

The money cannot go into a ‘Copenhagen launch fund’, because all of it has already been pledged to the World Bank. Some cheques have already been sent, and the final ones are due in April.

The use of the World Bank for climate...

WDM has been campaigning on trade issues for almost three decades and monitoring negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) since its creation in 1995.

Background

We have been an active part of the global community of campaigners that organise counter-summits and protests around WTO meetings. WDM also has a long track record of producing credible and incisive analysis of trade issues. We have attended the past four WTO Ministerial meetings:
Seattle (1999), Doha (2001), Cancun (2003), Hong Kong (2005).

We will be going again in November 2009 as world leaders push for a conclusion to the Doha round in the wake of the global economic crisis. Check here for updates.

WTO campaign successes

2004: Prevented the UK and EU from pushing through an agreement in the WTO which would have forced developing countries to allow western private companies to take over essential services such as water, banking and shops (GATS).

2004: Got the EU to drop its demands on developing countries in trade negotiations to open up their water services to private, western...

WDM campaigned on People Before Profits between 1998 and 2000, seeking to control the power of multinational companies with strong international regulation and individual action.

In the campaign against world poverty, WDM believes that we need to challenge today’s leading global economic players in order to put the rights and demands of the worlds poor before those of multinational companies.

The size and power of multinational companies is increasing rapidly:

• Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs).
• The Top 200 corporations’ combined sales are bigger than the combined economies of all countries, minus the biggest 10.

These companies could potentially bring benefits, but governments are failing to get them under control. People across the world are speaking out against multinationals abusing their power in the pursuit of profits:

At the core of the People Before Profits campaign was the recognition that the increasing power of multinational companies is not accompanied by sufficient regulation. A realistic and considered look at the roles of both governments and international institutions in regulating...

Today, an unprecedented legal battle will take place in the High Court over the Treasury's failure to stop the publicly owned Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) investing in what campaigners describe as 'some of the most environmentally damaging and socially irresponsible projects and companies around.'

The case is being brought by three small climate and social justice campaigning groups: PLATFORM, People & Planet and the World Development Movement, which has led some commentators to bill it as a 'ground breaking, David and Goliath case'.

Today's oral hearing will determine whether their claim can proceed to a full substantive hearing, likely to take place early next year. The Treasury has hired one of its top barristers, James Eadie QC, to handle the case but the campaigners are optimistic that they will be successfu Deborah Doane, director of the World Development Movement said:

"This is a classic David and Goliath battle. But we believe we have a strong case. The Treasury's decision to allow RBS to continue to invest in companies that exacerbate climate change and are linked to human rights abuses is unlawful, immoral and undemocratic. Hopefully, this case will be a pivotal point in ending RBS' destructive lending habits that go against the interests of UK...

Once again, this week, trade ministers from around the world are meeting, this time in Delhi, with the stated aim of kick-starting stalled World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks. And yet again, there is a lot of smoke and mirrors concealing countries’ true negotiating positions.

Part of the gathering of 50,000 Indian farmers who rallied in Delhi against the WTO

Why is India hosting this meeting? Does it really want to finalise a Doha deal, or is it hurt by accusations that it scuppered the July 2008 talks and so it just wants to be seen to be ‘talking the talk’? What position will the Obama administration take? Rhetorically, it talks about the need to sign a deal and for countries to avoid protectionism, but it is under huge pressure at home as unemployment grows and the recession continues.

Meanwhile, Pascal Lamy (the WTO’s director-general) continues to tighten the negotiating screws, stating that only 20 per cent of issues remain to be resolved. Proposals have been circulated to speed-up the process, to ‘bank’ what has already been agreed, and to move on to look at timetabling issues with the hope that this will unblock the remaining issues...

The World Development Movement is part of the Climate Justice Now! network, which is a southern-led coalition of around 150 organisations and movements campaigning for a globally just and effective solution to the climate crisis.

Climate Justice Now! principles

Communities in the global south as well as low-income communities in the industrialised north have borne the toxic burden of this fossil fuel extraction, transportation and production. Now these communities are facing the worst impacts of climate change - from food shortages to the inundation of whole island nations.

Inside the global climate negotiations, rich industrialised countries have put unjustifiable pressure on southern governments to commit to emissions reductions. At the same time, they have refused to live up to their own legal and moral obligations to radically cut emissions and support developing countries' efforts to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts.

Climate Justice Now! will work to expose the false solutions to the climate crisis promoted by these...

The G20 outcome is ‘a bitter pill to swallow’ for the world’s poorest people says the World Development Movement, the anti-poverty group that was banned at last minute from attending the G20 summit. The campaigners are dismayed that the G20 leaders have missed an historic opportunity to launch a global recovery plan that will benefit poor people and tackle the climate crisis.

Julian Oram, head of policy at the World Development Movement said:

“For the world’s poorest people the outcome of the summit is a bitter pill to swallow, as they are being hit hardest by the economic and climate crises. What is needed from the G20 is a radical shake up of the global economy, what we got was world leaders desperately rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. The commitments to stay on course to meet the Millennium Development Goals and to provide emergency funding for poor countries are welcome. But what was missing was a global green new deal that puts the interests of poor people and the environment at the heart of international trade and finance."

On the issue of free trade and a push for a deal at the WTO, Julian Oram, remarked:

"The G20 are absolutely right that trade is important to developing countries, but they...

Today, the World Development Movement warns that Gordon Brown's proposals at the G20 to salvage the global economy could be wrecked by contradictions between his tough talk on re-regulating the banking sector and the UK’s continued push for banking liberalisation in developing countries through European free trade deals.

The new report, 'Taking the credit’, reveals the extent of the negative consequences of the financial services liberalisation pushed on developing countries through EU free trade deals. These deals would lift restrictions on how multinational banks, like Barclays, HSBC, Santander operate in developing countries. The World Development Movement’s evidence shows such deals would mean that poor people and small businesses lose out on access to credit and other banking services.

Benedict Southworth, director of the World Development Movement said:

"On the one hand, Gordon Brown has developed a mantra of tough talk on the re-regulation of banks. On the other, together with other European leaders, he is aggressively pushing free trade deals which demand that developing countries follow a deregulated and liberalised banking model. That model has clearly and spectacularly failed here and has also failed poor people in the developing...

The European Union is currently negotiating a new wave of trade deals that will benefit European corporations at the expense of the world’s poorest people. These trade deals are unfair. They will reduce the ability of developing countries to use important policy tools to boost their own development and to support local industries. The evidence shows that these deals will not benefit the poor in these countries but will benefit a few multinational companies. The World Development Movement (WDM) is calling for these trade deals to be stopped. WDM analyses past trade deals in Mexico and South Africa to highlight the negative impact of such deals.