Speech by Sheila McKechnie

Sheila McKechnie
Director, Consumers' Association, UK

It's a cliché, but I think we all have to try and recognise that the world is not only changing faster, it is changing in very complex ways. Speed, however, throws up a number of major issues which I think underpin some of the problems that have been addressed this morning.

In many ways our political institutions at national, European, US government and global level are adapting too slowly to this new world. But global economic institutions have been there for some time and are setting the agenda. The dislocation between economic priorities and social, cultural, democratic and indeed every non-economic priority is the key tension in the future of our global environment. I would like to illustrate that very briefly by telling you a story. When Consumers International met in South Korea the words `IMF babies' were constantly cropping up in the press. For those of you who wonder what that means, let me tell you. The families inside Korea, who in many ways have family traditions and responsibilities that are much more robust than many of ours, were leaving children at orphanages because they could not afford to feed them. And the citizens of South Korea called these the IMF babies. Now that is not a world that any of our consumer groups affiliated to Consumers International want to live in. Economic decisions alone will not produce a more democratic world.

The complexity of change raises a whole series of other matters. The digital and the biotechnical revolutions are going to result in the kinds of shifts that we experienced during the industrial revolution. Many organisations have been very slow to understand the impact that this is going to have on the lives of the ordinary consumer. And just so that the government representatives here don't think that we consumer organisations claim to know all the answers, I can say that the changing nature of those global pressures is making us, as consumer organisations, look at our activities. If we cannot actually meet the needs of our consumer constituents, then we will not survive as organisations, just as businesses that fail to recognise the nature of the changing market place will not survive.

There is a sea change going on in the nature of consumerism which I think is important to understand. The model that my organisation had, the model that CU had, the model that many other European consumer bodies had was to give consumers high-quality information and allow the consumer to make the choice. The assumption was that the market works if there is a clear balance of information between the producer and the consumer. That simple model is no longer relevant. Our consumers want more than that from us.

If I take the difficult issue of food, what does it mean to a consumer to say `you can choose'? How many of us here in the next two days have any real control over what we put in our mouths? Yes, we can choose to eat meat or choose not to eat meat. But all of us here are dependent on the regulatory framework of the Belgian state to make sure that the food we eat over the next 24 hours doesn't actually poison us. The individual consumer cannot look at an egg and say, `This is safe' or `This is not safe'. So the challenge for consumer organisations is to assist consumers in a much more active way. Many of us are experimenting with how this can be done.

In the public policy arena consumer organisations are taking over those issues where individual consumer choice cannot prevail. Where the individual has no real choice, then we are the key organisations in civic society to engage with business, with governments, to make sure the level of protection is sufficiently high.

So the new model of consumerism is participative, interactive. And we consumer bodies are also players in the market place. My organisation is an internet service provider. So the problem of what is possible in terms of consumer protection in the market place is not an abstract issue. Other consumer organisations are moving in a similar direction, towards a more interactive relationship with the wider consumer world.

We want to shape this new world that we are living in and the transatlantic dialogue we are currently engaged in is a key part of that shaping process. And if you will allow me for just a minute to get on my Scottish soapbox, there has to be respect for difference. We European consumer organisations operate in15 countries and 15 languages; we know we have different political cultures, we know our consumers have different priorities, we have to learn to talk to each other. And we each have to learn that `my' way is not always the only way.

If you are going to respect difference, you must understand it. It might seem very odd to you Americans, but let me illustrate this. I don't think I understood the iconography of your Constitution. Why should I? The UK doesn't have one. That isn't how `my' democracy works. The statements that come from the American delegation about trade issues affecting or overriding the American Constitution is a concept that we Europeans have some difficulty with. It's not that we don't appreciate the points you are making, we have a different approach and different political cultures. We have to learn to listen to each other. And I think the respect for difference is essential. Without it, and without the dialogue, we cannot have a safer and better world environment.

I think we have to say to our respective governments that the dialogue to date has been a great disappointment to consumers. I haven't seen any evidence that the dialogue was anything other than liberalisation of trade, or, to use your word, `deregulation'. Liberalisation and deregulation have become one and the same thing in many of these trade issues and that means a decline in consumer protection. But what happened to human rights? What happened to children's rights? What happened to public health? What happened to education? What happened to peace and security? All these things were said in 1995 to be key issues in the dialogue.

I don't think the governments fully understand the imbalance of resources between the business community and the consumer community. We are not-for-profit organisations. Many of us are dependent on state funding. Many of us do not have means of generating resources. But if you let that dictate the level of our participation, then you will reap the whirlwind. And as GATT moves beyond trade liberalisation into national regulatory issues, its activities are affecting the day-to-day quality of life for individual consumers in our countries. Governments cannot do that without the acquiescence of consumers.

Let me illustrate how governments get it wrong. Take the issue of GMOs. This, from the European perspective, has shifted our attitude to trade in a way that no other issue has. One global multi-national company, Monsanto, said, `We are going to introduce a genetically modified crop and we are going to mix it with unmodified crops to produce a wholesale commodity crop, and we are not going to allow suppliers to have non-GM soya.'

The arrogance and the stupidity of that statement may well have set back the bio-tech industry for years. And it wasn't for want of telling them. I was in a meeting two or three years ago with the European Director of Monsanto and I said, as we all said, `This is going to end in tears'. If Monsanto was Carrefour, the big French supermarket chain, or if it were Tesco, the big British supermarket, it would be out of business now! Both Carrefour and Tesco have had to bow to consumer pressure or consumers would be boycotting their stores. The same applies to all EU food manufacturers and retail outlets.

I only had to write a very polite mild letter to Niall FitzGerald of Unilever and within three days Unilever was practically camping in my building, saying `What do you want us to do?' EU consumers have market power and if governments don't understand that and businesses don't understand that, let GMOs and Monsanto be a lesson to you. Because what we have done with Monsanto, we will do again.

Now that has to be, in some sense, a threat, because you have to understand that we are not here just to make speeches or make high-flown statements of principle. Indeed all principles taken to extreme become absurd. The world functions because we have to reconcile principles and negotiate compromises. We don't all get what we want all the time. But you have to negotiate with us or we will just shout louder and we will use our market power. And we are uneasy bedfellows - we know that. We're prickly, we're difficult, we're argumentative.

Sometimes, we consumer organisations are accused of not representing anybody but ourselves. That is unfair but the legitimacy of our organisations has to be part of this whole equation. Be warned - we have shown what can be done. The statement from the American government spokesperson on GMOs, which I felt was scientifically illiterate and intellectually infantile in terms of labelling, was not what we wanted to hear. Is the USA government really arguing that we have to have GM food until science shows there is a problem? Remember that we in the UK had BSE, and my government said: `There is no evidence that BSE can jump over species barriers, there is no evidence of harm.' The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The key element is the testing procedures. The Food and Drugs Administration procedures for GM foods are inadequate and in our opinion based on the wrong scientific model. We do not find theirs an acceptable approach.

But we are not against the new technology. We are not dinosaurs. We don't want to turn the clock back. We like this new world. For example, we love e-commerce. It has great potential to give my organisation power to bust some of the monopolies in Britain. We can't wait.

We've broken the cartels in the washing machine market. We are in the process of doing the same in the car market. We're having great fun. And the internet and e-commerce are going to be key for controlling monopoly power in the market place. Even so, caution is needed, so we will be discussing data protection issues later today.

To summarise, what we want from this process is to make the Dialogue meaningful. And Dialogue isn't about making speeches. So although you've had to listen to them this morning, dialogue is really about listening and engaging.

I hope my point about understanding differences informs the way we deal with each other over the next few days. But I want to say more than that. Going right back to the point at the beginning about the speed of change, the complexity of change and the slowness of institutions to respond, this Dialogue could become a model for ways in which governments do their proper job. The job of government is not to promote the interests of global business. The job of government is to balance the interests of business and consumers and to be fair. One of my colleagues said, `Oh, you can't use the word partnership, you'll sound like Tony Blair.' Sorry about that, but partnership is rather a good word. We don't expect to get everything we want, but we don't expect to be patronised. We want to be part of the negotiations. We have the scientific base to do so; we have the research base, we have the understanding, we have the legitimacy to represent your consumers and you need us, but we also need you.