Feminists at the WTO: entering the master's house?

(Photo: Kristin Sampson, IGTN)

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (Audre Lorde)

Banúlacht's decision to send a representative to the WTO was not taken lightly. As a feminist organisation we had to consider the possibility that engaging with the process and participating in the ministerial meeting as an NGO actually legitimates, rather than challenges, the WTO. On the other hand, as an organisation working on women's economic rights, the WTO ministerial is hardly something we could ignore.

Banúlacht participated at the WTO ministerial meeting as a representative of Women in Development Europe (WIDE), which is a member of the International Gender and Trade Network (IGTN). Each network had a sizeable presence at the WTO, with representatives from all the major regions of the world. Both networks engaged in following the negotiations. WIDE Director, Meagen Baldwin, was a gender adviser on the EU delegation (one of four NGOs in an advisory capacity), and was involved in daily or twice daily briefings at the NGO centre. The IGTN held daily briefings, with inputs and analysis from IGTN analysts and from officials and NGOs on national delegations. Outside of the main venue for official negotiations, WIDE and the IGTN also held workshops and participated in alternative events, including various marches and protests, as well as discussions, panels and other events.

However, unlike feminist engagement in UN spaces (CSW, CEDAW and even UNCTAD, the UN Convention on Trade and Development) where a gender perspective is integral to the processes, feminist analysis is an outsider position in the WTO. The WTO is explicitly about trade liberalisation and nothing else, there is no room for human rights and gender justice arguments within its discussions. Such arguments contest easy understandings and challenge neoliberalism, and would introduce cracks into the WTO logic that trade liberalisation is always good for development. So there is a kind of political screen around the WTO negotiations which it is virtually impossible for WIDE’s, the IGTN’s and other feminist analyses of gender and trade, or critiques from a human rights, labour or environmental perspective to penetrate: we are forced to leave many of our tools outside the master's door.


Women create a 'Junk WTO' tapestry as part of the alternative events held by NGOs in parallel with the WTO ministerial
(Photo: Kristin Sampson, IGTN)

Inside the official spaces at WTO meetings, WIDE and the IGTN don’t focus on mainstreaming gender into trade policy so much as act as trade policy advocates articulating positions in solidarity with countries of the South from a justice and human rights persepctive, aiming to highlight a gender focus in statements, declarations, press releases and on websites.

And to a degree, participating in this way can legitimate the WTO process, in the sense that in order to engage at this level, as insiders, organisations have to use the language of WTO discourse, and focus their policy advocacy at the micro level of technical discussions based on documents produced by the WTO. For Banúlacht, for example, it means deviating from our policy of using the term 'countries of the South', because the WTO documents are phrased in terms of 'developing countries'and 'least developed countries'-the master's language, the master's tools.

But only to a degree, perhaps, because feminist organisations, justice based groups, environmental NGOs, development agencies not only move between the NGO spaces and the official spaces inside the convention centre where the ministerial is held, but can also move between the official spaces and the alternative speaces, swapping colour-coded identity badges for NGO banners. In those spaces the focus is on the bigger picture and the discussions focus not on the minutiae of technical wording, but on the lived experience and detail of people's lives. In those spaces the lived experience, the local and the personal, become political and international through exchange, debate and protest.

And the presence of women farmers, women activists and epecially migrant women in all the alternative venues and in all the protests and demonstrations powerfully illustrated that although the WTO may not think there's any connection between gender equality and trade, women living with the impacts of trade liberalisation have no doubt that it does.


For more reports on the alternative events see earlier reports entitled 'A Walk through Victoria Park' and 'The Elasticity of NGO Women's Time'.

Everything but Development? Reports on key outcomes for countries of the South


Sinagbayan Political Theater Group performing 'FETAD!' (see report entitled 'A Walk through Victoria Park')

Brief report by Banúlacht, followed by an index of reports by the International Gender and Trade Network

What was at stake at the WTO?
· Doha Development Agenda versus global roadmap for trade liberalization
· Development paradigm versus market paradigm
· Flexibility, policy/decision making space of developing countries versus mandatory liberalization and the creation of a “one size fits all” paradigm

The “development package” was used as peacemaker; however, the deal extracted substantial concessions from developing countries in a number of areas:

Increases in aid for trade
A huge proportion of this will be provided as loans. It is a bribe for trade liberalisation because the aid is conditional on implementing the liberalisation, and ‘developing countries’ will be forced to liberalise before they have built up their supply capacity needed to engage in trade.

Non-Agricultural Market Access
Issue: In order for countries of the South to move from specialising in the export of agricultural products and other raw materials, they need to be able develop industries in processed goods. There is more profit to be made in producing a dining table and chairs than in selling timber, and in, say, canned fruit juices than unprocessed fruit. All the industrialised countries have historically used measures, such as import tariffs, to support domestic producers in the face of competition from cheaper imported goods (import substitution). Countries of the South need to have the freedom to impose high tariffs on imports, so that domestic producers are not driven out of business by cheaper imports (more on this on the website). The aim of the WTO is to eliminate these measures, which are seen as ‘trade-distorting’, and one issue at Hong Kong was what type of formula would be adopted for the reduction of tariffs. The formula that was agreed is the ‘Swiss formula’ which cuts higher tariffs proportionately more than lower tariffs, rather than cutting all tariffs at the same rate, ‘developing countries’ tend to impose higher tariffs (to protect local production and as a key source of revenue) so the Swiss formula penalises them disproportionately and deprives them of a key protectionist measure. While the announcement that 97% of tariff lines will be duty free and 3% will be at levels that the US determines sounds good. 3% translates into 300 lines, including all the important products of interest to LDCs, such as textiles.

(Photo: Kirstin Sampson, IGTN)





Services
Trade in services is determined by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Services (GATS). Until now, the GATS has operated on a request-offer system, whereby, Ireland, for example, requests that Ghana open up its banking sector to Irish banks, and Ghana has the option to consider the request or not. The industrialised countries were not satisfied with the rate at which the services sectors in ‘developing countries’ were opening up to foreign service providers. Under the new ‘plurilateral’ approach, if a ‘developing country’ receives a number of requests to open up a sector, then they will have to enter negotiations. This undermines the rights of countries of the South according to their own national needs to choose which service sectors to open and to what extent, and which to develop within their own countries.

Agriculture
The main benefit for the South was the agreement of a date for the final phasing out of export subsidies by developed countries in agriculture by 2013. There are no disciplines on trade distorting domestic support., so the structure of subsidisation by the EU and the US remains intact. This will allow for dumping to continue unabated. The EU can continue to use domestic support to the tune of $55 billion after 2013, by using the so called green box exemption for certain products. With cotton, the WTO calls for elimination of export subsidies by 2006, but does not deal with domestic subsidies under which the majority of trade distorting supports are reported.

Trade is complex and some ‘developing countries’ are aggressive players in trade, what this report focuses on is the impact of the WTO agreement on countries’ capacity to determine their trade policy and resist unbridled liberalisation. See article by Walden Bello on the Focus on the Global South website for more on the role of India and Brazil.


For detailed analysis by the International Gender and Trade Network, see the following links:

Reflection on the Hong Kong WTO Ministerial – Maria Pia Hernandez, IGTN Geneva
Available at

For additional commentary by IGTN on the progression of the Ministerial negotiations and IGTN activities in Hong Kong, please see the articles below, all available on www.igtn.org.

Updates on Ministerial:

WTO Still Standing - Development on Shaky Ground – January 3, 2006

Women’s Lives at Stake: Development Lost in Latest Draft – December 18, 2005

Draft ministerial text negates development – December 17, 2005

Developing Countries Resist the Expansion and Consolidation of Market Access in NAMA and Service – December 16, 2005

Developing Countries Challenge Worst of Draft Ministerial Text – December 15, 2005

WOMEN AT THE WTO DEMAND: NO SELL-OUT ON REAL DEVELOPMENT!!! – December 14, 2005


Note on language
While Banúlacht's policy is to use the term ‘countries of the South’, for purposes of clarity in this report, I use the terms ‘developed’, ‘developing’ and ‘least developed countries’. This is because the distinction between the two categories was crucial at these talks. The ‘Development Round’ was opened at the Doha ministerial, where the Doha Development Declaration was agreed: the distinction between the broad category of ‘developing countries’ and the 50 countries that the UN defines as ‘least developed countries’ (LDCs) is not made in the Doha Development Declaration. In the lead in to the Hong Kong ministerial, the terminology of ‘advanced developing countries’ was increasingly being used to describe the likes of India, Brazil and South Africa, which are major exporters, on the one hand, and distinguish them from the ‘LDCs’, for example Ethiopia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Timor Leste. This leaves countries such as Kenya, Ghana, Vietnam, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, ‘developing countries’ which have more capacity than the ‘LDCs’ to engage in trade, but are not included in the Development Package, in a grey area.