 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||
Disneyland, Doha and the WTO in Hong Kong:
The Spectacle of Corporate Fear, Absurdity and the New Universalism
by Hidayat Greenfield
November 21, 2005
It's fitting that the Sixth WTO Ministerial should arrive in Hong Kong only a couple of months after the opening of Disneyland. In both cases reality is abandoned at the door, while fiction and fantasy take over. The magical Doha 'Development' Round promises an end to global poverty and a new prosperity for all -- based on an agenda that boosts transnational corporate power and demolishes the remnants of political and social barriers to corporate profit. Like a rollercoaster ride through a fictional world, we set off to alleviate global poverty and arrive at greater impoverishment as the destination. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and dazzling special effects, but we end up where we began. We end up with US$545 billion in global agricultural exports co-existing with eight million people dying of hunger and hunger-related diseases every year, while tens of millions of small farmers and agricultural workers who produce the food that feeds the world are themselves living in hunger. In the fantasy world of the Doha Round 'market access' is the magical solution: small farmers and workers must compete harder, producing more for less, while pinning their hopes on access to overseas markets so they can sell more of the stuff that's impoverishing them. This will aggravate what a UN agency recently described as 'immiserizing trade' (trade that creates more misery), as agricultural commodity prices continue their free market freefall, driving down small farmers' incomes and workers' wages.[1] As the poverty gap widens, so too do the profit margins of the agri-food corporations and mega-supermarkets that control everything from the 'farm gate to the dinner plate.'[2]
Upon entering the fantasy world of the WTO and its magical Doha Round we're expected to embrace the irrational and absurd, accepting miraculous transformations that would otherwise violate our sense of what is real and rational. Access to water -- universally recognized as a human right yet denied to hundreds of millions of people throughout the world -- is transformed into a logical need to commercialize water supplies and open up water markets.[3] Water markets? In the real world we'd wonder, 'What the hell is a water market?' But here in the world of the WTO we're assured that everything is or should be a market in which private corporations are free to invest, buy, sell, and profit. Anything preventing corporations from doing so is a barrier, an 'unfair trade practice.' So let's be fair to corporations, they tell us. This absurd logic is supposed to generate acceptance of the absurd, no questions asked. So when the transnational 'services' conglomerate, Suez, proudly declares its motif 'Delivering the Essentials of Life' (including access to water: human right turned profitable commodity) we're left to wonder how the company took control of the essentials of life in the first place....
