Apologies for cross posting.

-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Robin Room
Sent: April 18, 2002 3:40 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [apolnet-l] Trade negotiations and alcohol policy



Listmates --
>       The Guardian (London)  yesterday had a story about the requests
> from the EU in the context of the GATS negotiations, the General
> Agreement on Trade in Services.  Jim Grieshaber-Otto and colleagues
> have been warning us about the potential of the GATS negotiations to
> force the dismantling of alcohol control systems (e.g.,
> http://www.ias.org.uk/theglobe/2001gapa2/trade.htm), and here is the
> evidence on it, from documents which were not intended to be public.
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7369,685670,00.html
>
> At the bottom of the story, in .pdf form, are the draft EU requests to
> a number of countries.  Here, for instance, is the request to Canada:
>
> http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2002/04/16/ca
> nada.pdf
>
> If you look down the document under Distrbution Services B and C, you
> will see the EU is requesting the abolition of the Canadian provincial
> alcohol monopolies.  (See also under Tourism and Travel-related A).
>
>       At this point, it seems that there is no public health input
> into these EU negotiating positions.
>       Nor, of course, are the negotiating positions of the other
> partiesin the negotiations available.  And neither is public health
> represented at the table.
>
> Below is a commentary from today's Guardian.  I have bolded an
> important paragraph in it. Robin
>
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,686141,00.html
>
> A privatisers' hit list
>
> European commission demands to deregulate services spell disaster for
> the developing world
>
> Katharine Ainger
> Thursday April 18, 2002
> The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>
>
> In the fevered imaginations of anti-globalisation protesters, the
> World Trade Organisation agreement known as Gats is a corporate boot
> sale of essential services, from water to electricity to the media. It
> is, they say, an attack on democracy that will lock the world into
> privatisation and deregulation of essential services ad infinitum.
> Now, as revealed in this paper, we have got the leaked documents of
> the European commission's secret WTO negotiating positions to prove
> it. Let no one wonder any longer why WTO negotiators have to meet
> behind six-foot fences to avoid protesters.
> The commission documents - leaked to Corporate Europe Observatory and
> posted on the Guardian's website - are breathtaking in scope. This is
> a corporate shopping list of requests to open up service sectors in
> everything from water supplies to banking in 29 countries, including
> China, India, Canada, Egypt, Mexico and the US. In a month, more
> countries will be included.
> The requests are described by an Indian NGO, Equations, as "a frontal
> attack on the Indian constitution". The Council of the Canadians, a
> large and moderate consumer group, described them as "chilling". The
> EU demands are extraordinarily aggressive - whether they are to remove
> the ability to limit Wal-Mart's activities in India, or to take away
> the Mexican people's control of the land along their borders, or to
> destroy Malaysia's capacity to regulate its financial sector.
> Despite the commission's cant that a "development round" of trade
> negotiations is under way at the WTO, an essential tool for poor
> countries - the ability to regulate foreign investment - is a key
> target. One of the arguments used to deflect critics of Gats is that
> developing countries have the choice to "opt in" the services they
> want to be liberalised, making exemptions for those they wish to build
> up domestically. What the documents show is that while that may be
> true, the commission has simply taken this list of exemptions - and
> used it as the basis for its liberalisation hit list.
> Water in developing countries is a major target for European companies
> in the current negotiations. Citizens from Ghana to Argentina and
> Bolivia have already strenuously resisted such privatisations. The
> idea that poor people's access to clean water can be adequately
> decreed by European corporations such as Vivendi or Thames simply has
> no basis in reality.
> Another controversial demand is for Canada, the US, Australia, China,
> India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Argentina, Panama and Colombia to make no
> market restrictions on the distribution, at wholesale or retail level,
> of alcohol or tobacco.
> To add insult to injury, while the EU incarcerates increasing numbers
> of migrants from poor countries, it is now pushing across the board
> for intra-corporate labour mobility under Gats. In a nutshell, that's
> free movement for corporate yuppies, but not for street-sweepers from
> Kenya.
> If this is the commission's negotiating position, what on earth does
> the US's look like? The commission has said that Gats is "first and
> foremost an instrument for the benefit of business". It is more than
> that. It is a corporate wish list made manifest. Corporate lobbying is
> its heart and soul. According to David Hartridge, former director of
> the WTO services division, "without the enormous pressure generated by
> the American financial services sector, particularly companies like
> American Express and Citicorp, there would have been no services
> agreement".
> What is the point of discussing how we fund our healthcare systems
> when we don't know what effect Gats will have on them? What we do know
> is that the US corporate lobby group, the US council for service
> industries, with its strong American healthcare contingent, has
> already complained: "Historically, healthcare services in many foreign
> countries have largely been the responsibility of the public sector.
> This public ownership of healthcare has made it difficult for US
> private-sector healthcare providers to market in foreign countries."
> Another of the most important members of the USCSI was Enron, pushing
> for energy deregulation worldwide. One Canadian activist, Tony Clarke,
> says that other members of the USCSI pushing for Gats reads like a
> "who's who of those connected to the Enron scandal", including the
> beleaguered accountants, Arthur Andersen.
> Secret trade and investment documents leaked over the internet are the
> dynamite keg that have brought other such treaties to their knees.
> Five years ago, US NGO Public Citizen found and posted an obscure
> investment treaty called the Multilateral Agreement on Investment on
> their website. What campaigners found in this text sparked an
> unprecedented worldwide campaign against it, until the treaty no one
> had heard of crumbled under public pressure.
> The lesson from the MAI is that it is no longer possible to negotiate
> trade and investment treaties in secret. As the Financial Times wrote
> in the wake of the MAI campaign: "That makes it harder for negotiators
> to do deals behind closed doors and submit them for rubber-stamping by
> parliaments. Instead, they face pressure to gain wider popular
> legitimacy for their actions by explaining and defending them in
> public."
> Katharine Ainger edits New Internationalist magazine
> <http://www.newint.org/>
>
>
>

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