Global Policy Forum

By Luke Phillips

Anti-globalisation groups, attending a WTO ministerial meeting here, charged Friday that corporate-driven global trade practices create a breeding ground for terrorism.

"The last two decades have been marked by inequality and poverty and also unrestricted trade liberalisation ... which create conditions for breeding grounds for terrorism," declared Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South.

"The regional context in which this conference is being held cannot be ignored," Bello said, accusing the WTO of meeting like "ostriches, with their heads in the sand." He was speaking as World Trade Organisation ministers opened a five-day conference here to forge an agenda for a new cycle of trade liberalisation talks.

Bello said it would be an "act of fundamental responsibility" for the WTO and delegation heads to issue a "strong statement asking for an end to the misery and tragedy being inflicted on Afghanistan." "International trade and politics are inseparable," he said.

Naeem Bukhari of Noor Pakistan warned that up to seven million Afghan refugees would flee the US bombardment of their country -- reprisals for harbouring Osama bin Laden, deemed the prime suspect by Washington in the September 11 terror attacks in the United States. While condemning the outrages in New York and Washington that killed thousands, Bukhari suggested that the United States should reassess its "interventions and policies in the world."

Anuradha Mittal of the US-based Food First said there was a "ground-zero being created in Afghanistan as we speak," a reference to the term used for the site of the bombed Trade Towers in New York. "It is important to look at the structural causes of why people are angry," Mittal added.

Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians likened the military strikes on Afghanistan to "trying to find cancer cells with a blowtorch." She said the US-led coalition in the campaign against terrorism was bullying developing nations into adopting "war economies" that diverted monies previously earmarked for health and education into military and border security.

US President George W.Bush was also using the events of September 11 to "impose a model on the whole world based on market values, North American dominance and deregulation," Barlow said. "There is a third way, and that is not the agenda of economic fundamentalism the North is pushing on the South" but fair trade practices, she said.

Joshua Mata of the Philippines-based Alliance for Progressive Labor said the suicide jetliner bombings were being used to "bamboozle developing countries into implementing a new trade round." The outrages have changed the international scene, according to Mata, "against the poor and in favour of the rightwingers."

"We are seeing a country bombed back into the Stone Age," Bello warned, adding that efforts to paint the anti-globalisation movement as somehow linked to terrorism were "malicious." It was the "equivalent of a red scare and an attempt to cloak problems brought on by corporate-driven globalisation," he said.

Non-governmental organisations are opposed to the WTO's proposed launch of a new round of trade liberalisation talks, arguing it will discriminate against developing countries.

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