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Phil. activists’ protest disrupts WTO director-general’s speech

Protest lasted for 30 minutes

HONGKONG (Dec. 13) — Filipino anti-WTO activists in Hongkong, including six leaders from the Cordillera region in northern Philippines and Philippine congress representative Satur Ocampo, caused a stir during the opening of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) 6th Ministerial Meeting on December 13 when they stood up in the middle of WTO director-general Pascal Lamy’s speech.

Ocampo, one of the three representatives of Bayan Muna (People First) party-list in the Philippine Congress, IBON research director Antonio Tujan, and around 30 other leaders of the Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) global alliance against the WTO, surprised the entire audience by standing up and brandishing signs that say, “WTO kills farmers,” “Stand Up For Your People,” and “Reject the anti-development Doha Package”.

The protesters, who were part of the NGO-accredited delegation inside the ministerial, chanted slogans such as, “Stand by your people, no unjust deal” and “People’s Rights Yes, WTO No!”

The protest lasted for about 30 minutes. The activists asked delegates to leave the ministerial hall after Lamy’s speech, and they peacefully marched toward the exit, still chanting.

According to Ocampo, he joined the NGO delegates because the WTO’s very existence was a bane against all poor and working people all over the world.

“Development is the biggest joke in the WTO, now running four years since the 4th ministerial in Doha, Qatar,” said Ocampo, stressing that for the last 10 years, “big corporations and banks in the industrialized countries have benefited from imperialist globalization at the expense of the millions of the world’s workers, farmers, fisherfolk, women and children.”

He said all talk of development under the Doha agenda was a “sham” and that “token talk of helping the least developed countries are merely meant to make the developed countries feel good about themselves, while they plunder the world’s markets.”

He said that under the WTO in the past 10 years, markets of developing countries like the Philippines have been forcibly opened up to the heavily subsidized industrial and agricultural products of developed countries.

He said that prior to the WTO, only 30.1% of developing country tariff lines were bound or committed for liberalization. This increased to 80.8% after the Uruguay Round. The average non-weighted tariffs of poor countries fell from 22% in 1991-1993, to 13% by 2000-2001. The number of their product lines with non-tariff barriers fell from 15-57% in 1994 to just 2-15% in 2003.

“It’s unconscionable that the WTO still demands the implementation of more destructive reforms in the economies of its member-nations,” the solon said.

Meanwhile, at a protest action in front of the US embassy in Manila, as a kick-off of the “Peasant Countdown vs. WTO”, the militant peasant group Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) dumped “imported vegetables” and unhusked rice to show its vehement opposition to the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) on a farmer, to dramatized the slow death experienced by farmers because of the decaying trade body.

Earlier last week, Benguet farmers launched a signature campaign against the WTO ministerial conference in Hongkong. As of last week, there were more than 30,000 who signed the peasant petition. # via NORDIS

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