Speech by Joan Claybrook

President of Public Citizen

February 10, 2000
Washington, DC

I am pleased to appear before you today on behalf of Public Citizen and our 150,000 members across the United States. I come today with a renewed sense of excitement and energy in the wake of the massive and diverse outpouring of citizen voices we heard during the recent WTO summit in Seattle. That diversity was demonstrated by the wonderful assemblage of signs we saw during the protests and marches. Some captured our concerns in a few words, such as "Human Rights, not Corporate Rights", "No Globalization without Representation", "Sweatshops: Free Trade or Corporate Slavery" and "WTO Breeds Greed". Others injected some humor. "Better Naked than Nike" and "Genetically Modify This".

In Brussels, U.S. government top officials left after they spoke. Now in Washington, they are boycotting this panel. It is not an auspicious beginning to the advent of the State Department's new involvement with the TACD.

I think it's important that we reflect for a moment on the meaning of Seattle, because it represents a sea change in the public discourse about globalization. Seattle was no fluke. It was no accident. Rather, it was the manifestation of a collective public outrage over the WTO's five-year track record of undercutting hard-won public health, safety and environmental safeguards. Hundreds of NGOs worked diligently to harness that sense of frustration and give it a positive outlet and a shared purpose.

In Seattle, we achieved many goals. We succeeded in educating the public about the true nature of the WTO, that it forces sovereign nations to adhere to certain corporate agendas in defiance of cultural differences and citizen values. We succeeded in capturing the attention of governments that support the WTO. Indeed, President Clinton applauded our presence. We stopped the negotiations aimed at expanding the WTO. After Seattle it is clear there must be public oversight of trade policy, which traditionally has been conducted in secret, with little or no public involvement.

The events in Seattle were the culmination of nearly a decade of work by an ever-growing international coalition of NGOs. In the US, partly because of the coalitions that evolved initially from the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, international commercial policy has been deadlocked for several years. American consumers rallied with labor and environmental allies to stop the undemocratic Fast Track procedure, which allowed the administration to negotiate trade agreements and then submit them to Congress for a quick up-or-down vote with no amendments. An informed and alarmed NGO movement brought the Multilateral Agreement on Investment into the light of day, where it withered in the sunshine. And this past year, faith-based organizations and other concerned groups managed to stall an unacceptable Africa trade bill that would put harsh IMF conditions on sub-Saharan countries.

We all know much effort was involved in organizing the Seattle demonstrations. Hundreds of NGOs worked around the world in the year leading up to it. Public Citizen had our chief organizer in Seattle working with hundreds of volunteers for most of the year leading up to the ministerial. And we published a book that detailed the trade disputes adjudicated to date by the WTO and some still pending.

Now that Seattle is history, we must capitalize on the momentum and the public's attention by rapidly developing and agreeing on our strategies for transforming the WTO.

Are we against trade? Do we oppose any and all globalization? Obviously not. However, what we are for is rules for a global economy in which consumers, farmers, workers and all other citizens who will live with the results are able to shape the design to meet the public interest. This means having a global trading system that respects the cultural differences among peoples and respects the value judgments made by sovereign nations as to the level of health, safety and environmental protection they deem appropriate.

This need reminds me of a recent U.S. film called the Cider House Rules. In the film, the workers who lived in the cider house, where they made apple cider, were forced to live under a strict set of rules in which they had no input. As a result, they ignored the rules. This is what is happening with the WTO. We are being forced to abide by rules designed by and for large corporate interests -- not by democratic processes and for citizens. The WTO is for General Motors, by Monsanto and of Pfizer.

These underlying rules must be rewritten to suit consumers' interest in both process and policy. We must radically restructure the way in which our governments undertake international commercial policy -- and we are not just talking about transparency, but about substance. This is our overarching goal, and it will be achieved. The WTO must bend or it will be broken apart.

The TransAtlantic Economic Partnership was designed and shaped in close cooperation with the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue -- without our input. That's why it is focused so heavily on economic integration, trade liberalization and harmonization rather than on public interest issues and enhancing core citizen safeguards in food and product safety or democratic governance. Yet, decisions reached in the TEP, in addition to directly affecting the day-to-day lives of hundreds of millions of US and EU consumers, may well go global in venues such as the WTO or into international standard-setting organizations that lack any semblance of due process or democratically validated authority but have been granted a new mandate for setting presumptively legal WTO standards.

In some ways, the TEP is the "flagship" of the WTO. The TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue was created five years after the TABD to balance the appearance of business-only input in the TEP. The TACD is still young, but we have taken our place in trade policy activities and insist that our governments respond to our concerns and not just pay lip service.

In Brussels, the TACD developed a series of strong recommendations to the US and EU on e-commerce, food safety and trade standards. In Seattle, the TACD issued a strong position paper calling for a moratorium on new health, safety and environmental challenges at the WTO until the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) and Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreements are reviewed and repaired with active consumer participation. And as a result of this meeting in Washington, we will be releasing an annual report, just as the TABD does, assessing governmental progress in accepting or implementing the TACD's Brussels recommendations.

The response to our concerns by governments is mixed, though not exactly encouraging. The EU is responding with comments to our recommendations. In the US, the administration has yet to deliver on President Clinton=s rhetoric about welcoming our participation. The Commerce Department and the US Trade Representative announced just last month that the two agencies will implement new procedures for environmental, consumer and other NGOs to comment on key trade issues. Yet, at the same time, the USTR is refusing to respond to our recommendations in writing.

This suggests that the time for a meeting of the minds on trade in the US is still in the distant future -- not only on overarching WTO issues but also on regulatory and harmonization matters. This is unfortunate given the president's acknowledgment in Seattle that the protesters had legitimate concerns.

Thus, on the immediate horizon, we in the US face a number of important trade battles. Our governments and business interests are devising new strategies after Seattle, now that they understand better the power that an aroused public can wield on this issue. They are well-armed with cash to spend, and they are already threatening to withhold campaign contributions to those in Congress who oppose them. In the US, the administration and business lobbies are waging an energetic campaign to persuade Congress to grant permanent most-favored nation status to China while labor, consumers, environmental and human rights organizations are lined up for a bruising battle to retain annual MFN review. Following their failure in Seattle to launch a new round of talks to expand the WTO's jurisdiction, government negotiators now seek to move back to Geneva to negotiate trade agreements on services and agriculture. We must continue to be diligent in tracking these activities no matter where the lobbyists huddle -- even in Doha, Qatar, the only country to date offering to host the next ministerial.

The United States trade officials are hinting at a few minor changes to meet our complaints about the lack of transparency, but these will not effectively address the anti-democratic policies of the WTO. And the TEP is developing a new animal (at least for us in the US) -- Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs) -- that bypass congressional approval. The MRAs focus on particular products, such as pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices, with industries pushing for removal of any impediments to trade. These MRAs could morph into harmonization of standards for these products, thus accomplishing the overarching industry goal: TESTED ONCE, APPROVED EVERYWHERE.

On Dec. 3, labor, environmental, consumer, human rights, religious and other NGOs from around the world joined in a collective cheer in Seattle when WTO Director Michael Moore and USTR Charlene Barshefsky announced a halt to WTO negotiations intended to launch a millennium round of WTO expansion. At that moment, we realized that the trade policy landscape had changed forever. Trade issues are now political issues that the public wants to know more about. These issues will be hotly debated in our presidential and congressional elections this year.

The TACD's role in making specific recommendations on complex trade issues now is more critical than ever. And we suddenly have more authority, because we are backed by the political muscle of a citizenry that has taken umbrage at the arrogance of our governments and transnational corporations, who want to ignore the public demands.

We respectfully suggest that the US government remains in the Dark Ages in thinking it can avoid our calls for real transparency and an overhaul of the substance of trade rules. The public is now engaged and this will only increase. As with every other major social movement in the US in the 20th century, this one must rise from the bottom up.

If the TEP is to be a flagship, then let us navigate a new course. The people in this room can seek to create a new type of international commercial policy -- one that is not dictated by corporate demands but that incorporates consumer concerns; one that does not circumvent Congress with MRAs, equivalency agreements and other tricks of the trade but relies on the democratic structures already in place to craft new polices that preserve democratic governance.

The TACD, which was initiated by the US and EU governments, presents an opportunity for cooperative discussions on broad and specific international commerce and regulatory policy issues with all of the major consumer groups together in one setting. We hope this opportunity will not be missed.

Thus far, the U.S. government has not embraced or adopted any TACD recommendations. Indeed, TACD members still face difficulties simply obtaining information from the government that the TABD gets. In fact, the US government approach is beginning to undermine the legitimacy of the whole TACD process. We look forward to discovering in the next 48 hours what areas of common ground we have and what strategies we can create together to advance the public interest in US trade policy. Seattle has demonstrated that the tide is turning. The TEP can swim with the current or get caught in the undertow.

Thank you.