URFIG Document - Position about GATS
Open
Letter to UNESCO’s Director General
on the Threats Presented by the GATS
Sir,
By adopting
the Marrakech Agreement in 1994, the signatory states – of which a large
majority are members of UNESCO’s General Council – adhered to the World
Trade Organization. On this same
occasion, they subscribed to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Yet, this very agreement constitutes one of the most serious
threats to which UNESCO has ever been confronted. The GATS and the preparatory measures for its implementation
have a profound impact upon the missions assigned to UNESCO.
Negotiations were to take place five years after the coming into effect
of the GATS to find ways to implement the agreement “in
view of progressively rising the level of liberalization”.
These negotiations are currently being held. Indeed, since February of this year, the WTO’s Council for
Trade in Services has been holding regular meetings, working groups and special
sessions. Classifications, domestic
regulations and subsidy policies, market access; in short, all policy aspects
are being examined by “commercially
correct” standards.
The
common will of the United States and of the European Union is to reach a general
agreement by December 2002. As
specified by an American note dated 13 July: “the
mandate of the negotiations is ambitious: to remove restrictions on trade in
services and provide effective market access, subject to certain specified
limitations. Our challenge is to
accomplish significant removal of these restrictions across al services sectors,
addressing measures currently subject to GATS disciplines and potentially
measures not currently subject to GATS disciplines, and covering all ways of
delivering services”. The
real intention transpires through this bureaucratic jargon, that is, impose to
the 137 WTO member states the opening in up of all services to free trade laws.
In the long term, this implies that the very notion of public services
will disappear, that all forms of diversity will vanish and that fundamental
rights will be negated. In Geneva,
the negotiators agreed to exclude the “protection
of general interest” from the GATS objectives. The WTO secretariat has indicated that “promoting competition and economic efficiency” is an objective
that all government must seek. The
European GATS negotiator has recently declared that “education
and health are ripe for liberalization”.
The Council for Trade in Services will hold a special and decisive
session at the WTO on the 5 and 6 October.
The question is how compatible are the missions entrusted to UNESCO with
the General Agreement on Trade in Services? The members of your General Council
have the responsibility of safeguarding UNESCO’s missions.
It is therefore a question that they should seriously and urgently
consider and answer. It is true
that the GATS does not apply to “services supplied in the exercise of government authority”.
However, the definition of these is very restrictive and only includes
those services which are either not provided on a commercial basis or not
subject to competition.
True
also that, up until today, each state still has the right to determine its
internal regulation (measures regarding personal matters, needs criteria,
technical norms, licenses, government monopolies, subsidies to establishment or
institutions). Nevertheless and as
of now, this regulation is being subjected to criteria developed within the
GATS. In this context, national
measures can in no case be “more
burdensome that necessary to ensure the quality of services”.
As the last resort, the WTO remains the only judge.
States are under the obligation to submit their domestic legislation and
regulations to the WTO which, if it does not – not yet? – have the power to
modify them, does, as of now, have the power to decree that these norms are
contrary to the GATS and to condemn any state which does not modify them
accordingly. When the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was adopted, all agreed that
national legislation was one of the essential tools for its implementation.
With the WTO, the laws of competition are completely undermining the
instrument of sovereignty, that is, national legislation.
For the countries of the South, this essentially means that national
preferences will disappear. In
doing so, the hope of seeing a development adapted to national and local
contexts and which takes into consideration diversity will be reduced to nil.
A
series of annexes to the GATS does provide a list of exemptions in which
countries are enabled to place limits on exemptions in particular sectors.
Nevertheless, this list amounts to but a very provisional and fragile guarantee
against the negative effects of liberalization.
Not only are the exemptions regularly reviewed, but they can also be
challenged by other WTO agreements. Thus,
for example, a number of GATS exemptions have been excluded from the agreement
on market access.
The
principle of the GATS by virtue of which there can be no discrimination against
any type of service providers will be imposed on all sectors, whatever their
scope and under any condition. Private
service companies will be able to use market laws to change service activities
falling in the area of fundamental rights, particularly education and culture,
into merchandise and sources of profit. From
now on, WTO documents only refer to an “Education
Market”. Education, training
and research will, step by step, be subjected to market laws.
School and university students will no longer be citizens exercising
their rights. They will become
consumers. Researchers will lose
the already restricted amount of scientific independence they enjoy.
Free access to education for all will be replaced by paying education for
the privileged few who have can afford it.
Domestic
policies aiming to safeguard some kind of cultural identity are considered to be
“obstacles to trade” by
transnational cultural industries. It must be noted that the audio-visual service sector,
libraries, archives and museums, botanical gardens and zoos, all of the services
linked to leisure (theme parks, leisure parks, sports centers), printing and
publicity, and all other services sectors of the kind fall within the scope of
the current negotiations. They do
so in the name of connectivity, a principle that challenges all of the service
sector classifications currently in force.
The protection of natural and cultural heritage and the management of
natural parks and biosphere reserves are directly threatened by proposals for
liberalization, particularly as regards the tourism sector.
Sir,
The General Agreement on Trade in Services which the WTO is preparing to implement greatly challenges a mission which has been entrusted to UNESCO; a mission which is based upon the idea that “a peace based exclusively upon the political and economic arrangement of governments would not be a peace which could secure the unanimous, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world, and that the peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind”; a mission that aims to favor the cooperation of the nations of the world in the areas of education, science and culture and ensure “full and equal opportunities for education for all, in the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth, and in the free exchange of ideas and knowledge.”
By their very nature, UNESCO’s protection and promotion activities stand in opposition to free market access, a rule now considered as absolute. Subjecting education, research and culture to free competition can only serve to aggravate deep-rooted inequalities in terms of access to these activities. With the liberalization of these services, what was a right for all will become a privilege for the few.
Sir,
We believe that, as the highest
authority of UNESCO, you cannot subscribe to the exclusively commercial vision
of education, science and culture that the WTO seeks to impose. We urge you to
consider the consequences and, together with us, call for the renegotiation or
suspension of the GATS.
Signatures
:
Mrs
Maude
BARLOW, The Council of Canadians, Canada
Agnès BERTRAND, Observatoire de la Mondialisation, France
Sara LARRAIN, Chile Sustentable, Chile
Danielle MITTERRAND, Fondation France-Libertés, France
Vandana
SHIVA, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, India
Lori
WALLACH, Public Citizen Global Trade Watch, USA
Mssrs.
Jean-Claude AMARA, Droits Devant !!, France
Pierre BOURDIEU, Etats généraux du mouvement social, France
José BOVE, Conférédation Paysanne, France
John
CAVANAGH, Institute for Policy Studies, USA
Noam CHOMSKY,
Professeur MIT, USA
Tony
CLARKE, Polaris Institute, Canada
Jean-Pierre et Luc DARDENNE, moviemakers, Belgium
Stefaan DECLERCQ, Oxfam-Solidarity, Belgium
Pierre GALAND, CNCD, Belgium
Teddy
GOLDSMITH, The Ecologist, Great Britain
Robert GUIDIGUIAN, moviemaker, Société des Réalisateurs de Films, France
Jean HURSTEL, directeur de l’espace culturel La Laiterie, Strasbourg, France
Raoul
Marc JENNAR , URFIG, Belgium
Martin
KHOR, Third World Network, Malaysia
Haruhisa KATO,
Professor (rtd), University of Tokyo, Japan
Jean-Henry ROGER, moviemaker, Société des Réalisateurs de Films, France
Edward
W. SAID, Professor, Columbia University, USA
Bertrand
TAVERNIER, moviemaker, France