WTO blog 1: Chickens come home to roost

I arrived in Geneva at 5pm this evening (having left my home in London at 6am) and I had to quickly drop my luggage off at the hotel, work out the tram system and then get myself to a meeting with other trade campaigners from around the world. I arrived at the meeting, just as the pizza did, so not bad timing I thought.

I’m here for the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial conference which is taking place on 30 November – 2 December. Ten years on from the Seattle protests that shut down the talks in 1999, the world finds itself in a perilous state faced with global emergencies in the economy, food, climate and employment. The chickens have come home to roost. Let me explain why…The economic crisis finds its roots in the deregulation of financial markets that enabled banks and lenders to engage in reckless lending and ultimately brought the global economy to its knees. The US and EU were key drivers behind this move to deregulate, they exported their deregulation agenda and got it enshrined in the WTO rules but now it is biting them back.

Last year, world leaders agreed on the need for more regulation to prevent a reoccurrence of the financial crisis, yet there are WTO rules that actually constrain governments from regulating their financial sectors. There is a whole raft of bans on regulation of various categories for example, bans on limiting transaction size and bans on regulating banks through creating firewalls between different parts of the business. According to these complex WTO rules, countries are not even supposed to bail out their own banks because it changes the ‘conditions of competition in the market’.... ahem…. that’s right - the EU and US are in violation of their own rules! Unfortunately, that’s not the end of it. Not only are there these existing rules that put hurdles on effective regulation but the WTO has further plans for more financial services liberalisation and deregulation.

At the meeting I went to this evening, campaigners from Africa, Latin America, Europe, US and Asia were not despondent instead they were sharing positive ideas on what they could do in their own countries as well as collectively to challenge this agenda. Which I think sums up the mood among the civil society groups here this week.