BY SEAN HEALY
MELBOURNE — Organisers of protests against the World Economic Forum have angrily rejected accusations that their opposition to "free trade" and corporate-driven globalisation is a new form of Western "protectionism" that will hurt the world's poor.
On September 5, Paul Kelly, the Australian newspaper's international editor, railed against "a new protectionist alliance in the rich nations; a student-greenie-union coalition whose aim is to deny the developing world what it so desperately needs: more access to rich-country markets". Similar accusations have been made in other newspapers.
"Our movement is internationalist and explicitly anti-protectionist", said S11 Alliance spokesperson Cam Walker. "The solutions we advocate are internationalist and global ones; they can't just be at the domestic or national level. To suggest we think otherwise is appalling and totally incorrect."
"What we're saying is that the globalisation process has to be a globalisation which reflects the world's majority, not the globalisation advanced by the elite", added Walker, who is also the national liaison officer for Friends of the Earth.
According to another S11 Alliance spokesperson, Jorge Jorquera, "It's the current global trade set-up, it's 'free trade', which is in reality protectionist: it protects the big corporations.
"Terms of trade between North and South grossly favour Northern firms, anyway", he said. "The World Trade Organisation's rules cement that in place, by forcing market-opening measures on the South, while explicitly allowing protectionist measures by the North."
Jorquera pointed to several examples of WTO-enforced, pro-Northern protectionism: the agreement on trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs), tariff peaks on Southern goods allowed in the agreements on agriculture and textiles and clothing; and stipulations allowing the US, Europe and Japan to apply "anti-dumping" measures as trade weapons.
"The entire global 'free trade' set-up is rigged against the poor", said Jorquera, who is also the Melbourne secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party.
"The S11 Alliance is part of a global tradition of protest", Walker continued, "a tradition which is equally strong, if not stronger, in the South as in the North. It is totally untrue to say that we are a Northern movement — although it's clearly in the World Economic Forum's interests to typecast us as that."
Jorquera also pointed out that the S11 Alliance's platform outside the conference's Crown Towers venue would feature representatives of trade unions and people's movements in the developing countries, including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Latin America, Somalia, Eritrea and Iraq.
"It's an absurd and insulting accusation to make, that the senior executives of the large transnational corporations, and cosseted newspaper editors, know the needs of the Third World's poor better than do the representatives of poor people's organisations", said Jorquera.