On Tuesday, 13th December, the Sixth Ministerial Meeting of the WTO opened in Hong Kong. At the opening ceremony, in an action to raise awareness of the profound differences between the major powers (EU and US) and the countries of the South, a group of about 30 NGOs stood up during WTO Director Pascal Lamy’s speech holding placards and shouting slogans protesting at the negative impacts of trade liberalization in the South. It's a symbolic gesture, tolerated by the organisers, but no less important for that. Symbolism counts: at the Doha Ministerial meeting, NGOs lined up outside the opening ceremony with tape over their mouths. Both gestures underlined the sense here at the Honk Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre that WTO, the development NGOs, the powerful blocs, the corporate lobbyists are all speaking different languages. And in particular, the while the word ‘development’ exists in all of them, in this babble of voices, the word has a different meaning in each.

For the WTO it means incorporation into the world economy through opening of economies through trade liberalization. For counties of the South, it means the freedom and flexibility to determine their own economic policies, through using protective measures, such as tariffs, to protect developing industries from cheaper imports, as all the industrialized countries have done when their industrial base was developing. The EU and the US make the assumption that cheaper imports from the North benefits the consumer in the South by making goods cheaper, and so making their income stretch further. As Martin Khor of the Third World Network puts it-if this were so, we’d be all for lowering trade barriers. But opening up economies of the South in this way has resulted in job losses and decimation of local businesses which cannot compete, especially with heavily subsidized products from the North. So since the consumer is also a worker, she now has no income to spend on these cheaper goods.

For Banulacht, WIDE and the IGTN, any meaning of development has to have gender justice at its heart. But here at the WTO, gender is not taken seriously. We believe that it is critical that:
• No agreements are made at the WTO that contravene international human rights agreements including the principles and frameworks for action of the Beijing Platform for Action.
• In order for the WTO to achieve the objective of a Development Round, issues of concern to developing countries must be prioritised and these issues dealt with on the basis of the ‘less than full reciprocity’ principle. Countries of the South (developing countries) must have the policy space and flexibility to:
o Develop fair and sustainable economies that contribute to women’s empowerment
o Protect and promote employment, social welfare, health for women and men and the environment
o Promote sustainable conservation and the sustainable management of all resources
• The EU should exclude essential services such as water, education, health from the GATS negotiations.
• The EU should respect the right of developing countries to develop and implement agricultural policies that guarantee food security and strengthen domestic agricultural markets, most particularly those where small-scale farmers, who are mostly women, trade their products.