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The World Trade Organization (WTO) is a global trade institution with teeth. It is responsible for administering dozens of international trade agreements and declarations on a range of issues from agriculture to intellectual property rights. It also handles trade disputes, monitors national trade policies, and operates as the overarching forum for global trade negotiations, called “rounds."

The WTO is crafted like no other international agency. It has a “legal personality” and the power to enforce its rulings. It has an international status equivalent to the United Nations, but unlike the UN, it carries the powers and tools of a global government. WTO rulings are so powerful, they take precedence over multilateral environment agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity; human rights agreements like the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and international labour codes, such as those of the International Labour Organization. WTO rulings apply to laws at every level of domestic governance – federal, provincial, state and municipal.

In this section, you’ll find more information about the global campaign to oppose the WTO. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, contact us at inquiries@canadians.org, or 1-800-387-7177.

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Letter to Ambassador Gero re: WTO and financial regulation Stuart Trew, Trade Campaigner, The Council of Canadians, March 16, 2010

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Civil Society Open Letter to WTO Director General Pascal Lamy: The impact of trade liberalization on the realization of human rights
A response by 10 international organizations to Pascal Lamy’s statements during a January 11-13, 2010 Colloquium on Human Rights in the Global Economy, co-organized by the International Council on Human Rights and Realizing Rights in Geneva. The groups explain clearly where the WTO has failed to consider human rights and development in its rulemaking and decision making. “From a human rights and development perspective, even in the highly hypothetical situation where adequate social protection systems were in place, it does not always follow that trade liberalization will be ‘successful,’ as your ‘Geneva consensus’ suggests,” states the letter, which calls for “a much more forceful and meaningful approach to ‘policy space’ for developing countries to make sure trade obligations do not contravene their right to development and do not inhibit their capacity to fulfil their human rights obligations.” Read more »

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2009 WTO Ministerial Meetings in Geneva

Council of Canadians vice-chair Leo Broderick and trade campaigner Stuart Trew were in Geneva participating in counter-ministerial events and raising concerns about the impacts of the WTO agenda from November 30 to December 2, 2009. Read more »

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Our World is Not For Sale – Global Turn Around!

The Council of Canadians endorses the Our World is Not For Sale (OWINFS) network’s call to “unite and confront the converging global crises of our times, replace the trade and investment pacts and related juggernauts of the corporate-driven global economy, and start building a sustainable economic future together.”

The OWINFS network, to which the Council of Canadians is a member, is a loose grouping of organizations, activists and social movements worldwide fighting the current model of corporate globalization embodied in the global trading system. OWINFS is committed to a sustainable, socially just, democratic and accountable multilateral trading system.

In late November 2009, another World Trade Organization ministerial meeting was held to once again try to kick-start stalled global trade talks whose successful conclusion would only perpetuate a failed global economic regime and put unnecessary limits on government action to protect jobs, the environment, food security, culture and democratic governance. Several days later, world leaders met in Copenhagen for a UN Climate Summit to consider trade impacts of serious climate change action.

“To overcome the current global and systemic crises that now engulf the planet, we must collectively call for the building of a new economic order -- one that puts the satisfaction of basic human needs and the implementation of all social, economic, cultural, political and human rights at the centre of its program priorities -- and one that is based on models of production and consumption that respect the natural resource limits of the planet, an equitable distribution of these resources among people, and the use of clean, safe and renewable energy resources,” says the OWINFS statement.

OWINFS calls on social movements, labour unions and civil society organizations around the world to work together in the coming months to resist and replace the neoliberal trade and globalization regime that is causing and intensifying the global crises:

• by organizing actions and mobilizing our members to prevent the conclusion of the Doha Round of the WTO before and after its ministerial meeting in Geneva;
• by promoting and establishing a moratorium on bilateral and bi-regional free trade negotiations in particular countries and regions;
• by taking action to ensure that the WTO and its neoliberal model of trade are delegitimized as false solutions leading up to the Climate Summit in Copenhagen.

Read the full Global Turn Around statement here.
Read the OWINFS Statement of Political Unity here.
To sign the OWINFS Global Turn Around statement, click here.
OWINFS statement: Abandon Doha - Confront the Crisis (PDF)

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Resources

• Celebrating Seattle and ten years of working for democracy, The Council of Canadians, 2009
• Trade bullies: Hong Kong ministerial gives rich countries one last chance to pick on the south - Canadian Perspectives, Spring 2006
• Making the Links: A Peoples’ Guide to the WTO and the FTAA
• Thirst for Control: New Rules in the Global Water Grab
• Trade and Culture
• The European Commission's GATS Position: A Bad Bargain for Canada
• Separating WTO Fact from Fiction (PDF)

WTO Ministerial Meetings:

• Geneva, 2009
• Hong Kong, 2005
• Cancun, 2003
• Doha, 2001
• Seattle, 1999

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Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)

Unlike the World Trade Organization, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is an entity still in the process of being created.

Although negotiations are currently stalled, the new FTAA would be a hemispheric-wide free trade zone covering 34 countries in North America, Central America, South America and the Caribbean, minus Cuba.

Touted to be the largest free trade zone in the world, the FTAA would encompass a population of over 800 million people and a combined annual gross national product of U.S. $11 trillion.

The FTAA gained prominence in the public eye during the demonstrations against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, where thousands of people raised their voices in the midst of teargas and police repression, to demand that democracy come before trade and that governments place the rights of people before the desire of corporations to make a profit.

For more information about the FTAA , click here.

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updated March 17, 2010