[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 16]
[House]
[Pages 21514-21515]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            WTO MINISTERIAL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized 
during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, we have seen little press coverage in 
the United States of the World Trade Organization before its 
ministerial beginning this week in Cancun, Mexico. But around the 
globe, the WTO's 5th Ministerial is a big story. The divide between WTO 
nations about its future is coming into public view. At stake in Cancun 
is the future of the World Trade Organization and how it will implement 
corporate globalization. Success or failure depends on which side of 
the divide countries stand. Given that the most powerful countries of 
the WTO, partnering with the supposedly neutral WTO Secretariat, have 
set the meeting's agenda to suit their goals. There can be no good 
outcome.
  The best result is what the U.S. media may report as a ``failure.'' 
The small block of powerful nations fail to steamroll the majority of 
the WTO's members who are developing nations, and the summit ends in 
deadlock. The problem is that the U.S., the European Union, Japan, and 
a handful of other rich nations want the WTO to be ``the constitution 
for a single global economy,'' a description that the first WTO 
Director General famously uttered in a moment of unguarded candor.
  They want the WTO to enforce one-size-fits-all rules on an array of 
issues ranging far beyond trade which all WTO countries must adopt as 
their domestic practices. These broad WTO rules would implement 
worldwide what has become known as the ``Washington Consensus.''

[[Page 21515]]

  While this agenda has proven to be a devastating failure; its agenda 
of eliminating a role for Government and public interest regulation of 
the market, establishing new property rights and protections for 
corporate interests, of creating tradable units out of vital public 
services, privatizing water, supplies, all of that, genetic materials 
and common resources, is at the heart of the WTO, which currently 
enforces 18 expansive agreements implementing this version of 
corporate-led globalization. Yet to the world's largest corporations 
and their client governments, this is only the beginning.
  The U.S., the European Union, Japan, and others are pushing for 
decisions in Cancun to add to the WTO extreme terms that are now only 
contained in the clearly failed North American Free Trade Agreement. 
These new issues include expansive new investor rights, rules on 
government procurement eliminating local or environmental preferences, 
undercutting domestic environmental food safety laws, and new rights 
for foreign service corporations to turn Government services such as 
water treatment facilities, how we get our water, into for-profit 
foreign or domestic corporations.
  Meanwhile, an increasingly consolidated block of developing nations 
have a different view. These nations want the WTO to deal simply with 
trade, World Trade Organization, and do so in a way that benefits all 
of the WTO nations, not just the most powerful and the richest 
countries.
  While different developing nations have different ideas about fair 
trade, they are united in opposing any expansion of the WTO into these 
new areas outside of just trade. When the Uruguay Round in 1994 created 
the WTO, developing countries were promised major gains. They were 
promised that industrialized nations would lower and eventually 
eliminate tariffs on items like textiles and apparel and cut 
agriculture subsidies that have enabled huge agribusinesses to dominate 
the world market. They were promised the WTO would be good for 
development in the poor countries. Newspapers and opinion shapers 
largely endorsed the ideas and promoted it.
  As the WTO, however, moves forward on new issues of negotiations, 
these promises remain utterly unfulfilled. If the WTO is to maintain 
trade credibility as a trade organization rather than evolving into the 
CHO, the Corporate Handout Organization, it must revisit the issues 
that affect developing nations before adding to its agenda and it must 
stop pandering to the largest, most powerful multinational corporations 
in the world.

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