Stopping Corporate Globalization and Promoting Trade Justice

The WTO’s trade rules, and those of many other regional trade agreements now in existence and being negotiated, promote the power of corporations in the global economy by providing new investor, intellectual property and other rights. At the same time, they lock in neo-liberal policies of privatization and deregulation. All this is done under the guise of “free trade“. This imbalance in power promotes the economic self-interest of a few global economic giants, often with devastating effects on local economies, particularly in developing countries.

Such corporate power is being ratcheted up through regional and bilateral trade and investment agreements. Their powerful rules promote corporate rights and pose a serious threat to local democratic authority. Under some accords, in fact, foreign corporations can now sue national governments for "lost profits" if any law or regulation in the country reduces their present or future profitability. Environmental, labour, and social rights all become secondary to the right to corporate profits. This trend must be reversed.

Having successfully thwarted the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, which would have enshrined such corporate rights, we call for an end to the corporate strategy of promoting the rapid and reckless expansion of regional and bilateral trade and investment agreements that attempt to reinforce the faltering WTO. We also call for an end to trade rules that guarantee a foreign investor's right to profit by exposing domestic regulatory policies to investor challenges and demands for compensation from public funds.

To begin moving toward a just trading system, we call on governments to negotiate a legally binding agreement to ensure that corporations are held democratically accountable for their conduct with regard to their social, economic and environmental impacts, including the role that some play in supporting repressive political regimes and marketing of weapons. This should be done through the UN and other appropriate bodies, with full participation of civil society.

Further we call on civil society organizations and movements to initiate a global civil society dialogue on developing an alternative, just and sustainable trading framework to replace the neo-liberal model, one that genuinely promotes pro-people and rights-based sustainable development and that puts communities first.

We are committed to an ecologically sustainable, socially just and democratically accountable trade system. Thus, as a first step, we demand that our governments implement the changes listed in this document in order to constrain and roll back the power and authority of the WTO, and to turn trade around and create a just system. We commit ourselves to mobilize people within our home countries, regionally, and globally to fight for these demands and to defy the unjust policies of the WTO and the broader multilateral trading system.

The choice before us is stark: either we accept the current corporate-centered global order and forfeit the welfare of succeeding generations and the future of the planet itself, or we take up the difficult challenge of moving toward a new system that puts at its heart the interests of people, communities, and the environment.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14