At the UGM of Keele University's Student Union last night, the students voted in favour of taking research on the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services, or GATS for short. GATS is an international trade agreement, which if ratified, may cause countless suffering and misery for millions of people worldwide. GATS plans to open up services traditionally under tight Government regulation, such as education (particularly Higher Education), healthcare, and water services, and opening them up to multinational companies, who can then profit from them. This process of letting private companies gain access to public services is called privitiastion. There is a serious danger that when public services are privatised, the price will skyrocket out of many people's reach, particularly in poor counties. An example is the privatisation of the water supply in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Water prices increased by up to 200%, and collecting rainwater off the roof without a permit became illegal. This sparked off violent protests where tens of thousands of people took to the streets. Six people died and hundreds injured in clashes with police and soldiers. In the end the government backed down and put the control of the water supply back into local hands. If GATS had been signed then, there would have been no way back once the water was privatised. Privatisation can also result in the quality of services detiorating. This can be clearly be seen in the British railway system, where 59 people have been killed in accidents in the last five years, many of which were cause by outdated systems and poor track maintanice. Trains in this country are now notorious for running late. Many call for the renationalisation of the railways, but under GATS this would be impossible.
Finally, higher education is in particular under the scrutiny of the GATS. If this goes ahead in its current form, we could see private companies taking over major universities, and tuition fees would skyrocket, denying many people, both in this country and worldwide, their right to education. The takeover by corporations and the increase in corporate sponsorship will also have the knock-on effect that research on issues that may harm sponsors, such as environmental research and oil companies, or the impact of GM foods and biotech companies, would be stopped.

At the UGM, the original motion was intended to take action against GATS, but many people were uneasy about the lack of hard evidence that GATS would have such impacts. As a result, the motion was amended so no actual action against the GATS can be taken by the Union. However, the people behind this motion are working hard to provide those hard facts, and to strengthen the case against GATS even further. People just have to look at the WTO's previous track record to understand that something is not right about the WTO, or GATS. For example, people in South Africa and Thailand are dying of AIDS because a WTO agreement, called TRIPS, prevents them from manufacturing cheap anti-HIV drugs, because that have to pay to use the patents held by multinational pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, which drives the price beyond the reach of the people who need it most.
Another point, the major case against the anti-GATS motion was that was all based on theories, and there is no proof that GATS will have these undesired effects. However, there is no proof that GATS won't have these undesired effects either, and to me, it's is much better to choose the safe option and oppose it, especially because there's no going back once a country has signed up to it, and a lot of the proposals in GATS are ringing alarm bells throughout the world.
There is a lot of suffering in the world, many of which developed nations have the power to prevent it if the so wish. Sadly, the opposite is true, and capitalism, and the world's obsession with profit, has meant our world is a world of "haves"whocan afford to live in relative luxury, and "havenots" for which every day is a struggle to survive. The actions of organisations such as the IMF, World Bank, and WTO are only beneficial to the large corporations and their profit-hungry shareholders. For everyone else, it's a disaster waiting to happen, and for many, that disaster IS already happening.