Pirates of the Caribbean
and the curse of the WTO in Cancún

9 September 2003

The Pirates
September is stormy season in the Caribbean resort-town of Cancún. Far out on an inaccessible causeway that reaches into the Gulf of Mexico, the World Trade Organization is preparing for its Fifth Ministerial meeting, beginning tomorrow and ending on 14 September.

The WTO has always displayed a poor sense of symbolic local geography. A quiet fishing village for most of the 20th century, Cancún was chosen by a computer in 1970 to be the location for casino, sun, sex, and resort-style tourism. Almost unparalleled in the country for the level of inequality between rich and poor, it has one of the lowest minimum wages ($3 a day) and the highest crime rate in Mexico. The Zona Hotelera where the WTO Convention Centre is located is a 'plastic playland' of strip malls, sex clubs and burger joints entirely separate from the real town. This is the dream of prosperity that neoliberalism holds out for Mexico. There is a Rainforest Café here where you can buy souvenir leather jackets emblazoned with the words 'Save the Planet', built on the clear-cut of real rainforest. The resorts appropriate and poison the groundwater for local workers who live in poor suburbs nearby. Giant five-star faux-Mayan temple hotels tower above the causeways upon which real, ragged descendents of the Mayans sleep at night. This is a non-place, a place where everybody comes from somewhere else, and there are no homegrown grassroots political organizations to speak of. Most Mexicans are unable to afford to come here to protest.

But modern day pirates of the Caribbean, are nevertheless currently gathering on the shore to try and shiver the WTO's timbers. A band of over 2,000 NGOs are here to beseech and condemn. International peasant farmer organization Via Campesina is out in force, and farmers from Thailand to Brazil to Honduras have joined Mexican counterparts in a large encampment on the edge of town – tomorrow several thousand of them will attempt to stop WTO delegates arriving at the Convention Centre. A caravan of buses of students from Mexico City wove its way into town last night pursued by police sirens; and another came from Chiapas, the home state of indigenous rebel army the Zapatistas who have sent a group of delegates and also these words: 'There will be mobilizations in Cancún and throughout the world against those who think they are the owners of the planet. The word of the Zapatistas will go to Cancún and to the planet... In order to build a new world, all men and women must make ourselves children of rebellion and resistance.'

Perhaps the present-day protesters really are the children of rebellious pirates. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Yucatan Peninsula sheltered pirates hiding from colonial law, and their attacks ended Spanish control over some indigenous Mayan areas in the region.

In this era the ultimate obstacle to free trade was pirate attacks against the merchant ships of the Spanish and British Empires. According to historians Linebaugh and Rediker, early anticapitalists included pirates who liberated slave ships and took them over, mutinous sailors who joined the pirates, freed slaves, and other outlaws. Sailing the Atlantic and traversing the Caribbean, these 'outcasts of the Nations of the Earth' transmitted revolutionary ideas by sea, and created liberated autonomous zones beyond the reach of the colonizers' authority. Linebaugh and Rediker describe democratic pirate ships where the outlaws decided things 'in common' and lived out a liberated existence. As Linebaugh and Rediker write: 'The globalizing powers have a long reach and endless patience. Yet the planetary wanderers do not forget, and they are ever ready, from Africa to the Caribbean to Seattle to resist slavery and restore the commons.'

The Curse
The World Trade Organization is dogged by a terrible curse. Not only is it pursued relentlessly by a motley band of fearless outlaws known in Mexico as los globalifóbicos, but each step it takes towards a world of multilateral free trade is slower, less sure, more plagued by infighting, arm-twisting and stagnation. An institution in which at each meeting the rich world pushes hard to get the poor world to open markets in goods, services, and companies whilst ruthlessly protecting its own markets is cursed indeed. And on the eve of the Cancún meeting, it looks as though the WTO's ship may be sinking.

In 1999 the Third Ministerial meeting of the WTO in Seattle was met by seventy-five thousand activists using decentralized direct action techniques who locked-down and blockaded the conference centre. Attacked from without and riven by revolt within as developing country negotiators, strengthened by the protests, refused to be bullied by the rich nations, the meeting collapsed and the WTO was unable to launch a fresh round of trade negotiations.

'We must never meet in a democracy again,' was the WTO's post-Seattle assessment. They chose Doha, Qatar – where protest is forbidden - as the location for the 2001 meetings. Yet once again, the WTO had chosen unwisely when the September 11 attacks and subsequent bombing of Afghanistan made this venue spectacularly unpopular with Western business lobbyists and frightened delegates. There was talk of cancellation, but Qatar made it clear that this would cause grave insult. Dick Cheney barked his orders and the delegates went to the meeting armed with anthrax antidote and gas marks.

Heavy pressure on developing countries from the US and EU in Doha finally led to an agreement to launch what they described as the 'Development Round' of trade liberalization. 'We are made to feel that we are holding up the rescue of the global economy if we don't agree to a new trade round here,' said an offended delegate from Jamaica. Already the so-called Development Round has become known as an Anti-Development Round, as promises to make trade rules more favourable for poor nations.
have proved to be short-lived.

On the WTO's agenda in Cancún are negotiations of existing rules from previous rounds of talks such as liberalization of services (the General Agreement on Trade in Services or GATS). That’s trade in 'everything you can't pick up and throw', from electricity to water, from media to health, from accountancy to tourism. This is an extraordinarily far-reaching agreement – roughly two-thirds of the EU's economy, for example, is in services. And GATS locks signatories into enforced privatization of almost anything that could be deemed a service.

Proposed 'new issues' being pushed by the rich countries to expand the WTO's liberalization even before its current rules have been fully negotiated are strongly opposed by developing country delegates. Of particular concern is an investment agreement for which the EU has been pushing hard, claiming that it will bring development benefits. In fact, the major lobbyists for and beneficiaries of such an investment agreement will be unprecedented new powers for multinational corporations companies, who will gain greater 'rights to roam' in the global economy.

Little reported, but arguably one of the most crucial aspects of the negotiations at Cancún involve the status of international environmental treaties such as the Montreal Protocol, which regulates the production, consumption and export of substances which damage the ozone layer, the Basel Convention which controls trade in hazardous waste, and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which regulates trade in genetically modified organisms. The Committee on Trade and the Environment is focusing on whether agreements like these are 'compatible' with existing WTO rules, and their deliberations could endanger the status of many. The prospect of the trade corpocracy decimating hard-won environmental agreements is among the more depressing prospects on the cards.

But it is the liberalization of agriculture that is the make-or-break issue for the trade-talks. Europe and the US refuse to remove subsidies – which mostly benefit the wealthiest of their farmers and agribusinesses – for their agricultural sectors, yet developing countries have had to open up their own farming sectors. As a result, poor farmers have to compete with goods from the US and the EU that flood their markets at below the cost of production. Developing countries, increasingly willing to unite and put up a fight against the powerful countries, say they will refuse to agree to anything else until this issue is resolved. These could be the rocks upon which the WTO falters - for failure at Cancun could fatally damage the credibility of the entire institution.



The author is a member of Notes from Nowhere editorial collective, whose new book We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism has just been published by Verso.
www.WeAreEverywhere.org