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The Historic Significance of Seattle
by Vandana Shiva,
Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology
The failure of the WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle was a historic watershed. It demonstrated that globalization is not an inevitable phenomenon which must be accepted at all costs but a political project which can be responded to politically. 50,000 citizens from all walks of life and all parts of the world were responding politically when they protested peacefully on the streets of Seattle for four days to ensure that there would be no new round of trade negotiations for accelerating and expanding the process of globalization.
Trade Ministers from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean were responding politically when they refused to support a "contrived" consensus since they had been excluded from the negotiations being undertaken in the "green room" process behind closed doors. As long as the conditions of transparency, openness and participation were not ensured, developing countries would not be party to a consensus. This will make bulldozing of decisions difficult in future trade negotiations.
...globalization is not an inevitable phenomenon which must be accepted at all costs but a political project which can be responded to politically.
The rebellion on the streets and the rebellion within the WTO have started a new democracy movement—with citizens from across the world and the governments of the South refusing to be bullied and excluded from decisions in which they have a rightful share.
Seattle had been chosen by the US to host the Third Ministerial conference because it is the home of Boeing and Microsoft, and symbolizes the corporate power which WTO rules are designed to protect and expand. Yet the corporations were staying in the background, and proponents of free-trade and WTO were going out of their way to say that WTO was a "member driven" institution controlled by governments which made democratic decisions.
WTO has earned itself names such as World Tyranny Organization because it enforces tyrannical anti-people, anti-nature decisions to enable corporations to steal the world's harvests through secretive, undemocratic structures and processes. The WTO institutionalizes forced trade, not free trade.
The WTO tyranny was apparent in Seattle both on the streets and inside the Washington State Convention Center where the negotiations were taking place. Non-violent protesters including young people and old women, labor activists and environmental activists and even local residents were brutally beaten up, sprayed with tear gas, and arrested in hundreds. The intolerance of democratic dissent, which is a hallmark of dictatorship, was unleashed in full force in Seattle. While the trees and stores were lit up for Christmas festivity, the streets were barricaded and blocked by the police, turning the city into a war zone.
The media have referred to the protesters as "power mongers" and "special interest" groups. Globalizers such as Scott Miller of the US Alliance for Trade Expansion said that the protesters were acting out of fear and ignorance.
The thousands of youth, farmers, workers and environmentalists who marched the streets of Seattle in peace and solidarity were not acting out of ignorance and fear; they were outraged because they know how undemocratic the WTO is, how destructive its social and ecological impacts are, and how the rules of the WTO are driven by the objectives of establishing corporate control over every dimension of our lives—our food, our health, our environment, our work and our future.
The real Millennium Round for the WTO is the beginning of a new democratic debate about the future of the earth and the future of its people.
The real Millennium Round for the WTO is the beginning of a new democratic debate about the future of the earth and the future of its people. The centralized, undemocratic rules and structures of the WTO that are establishing global corporate rule based on monopolies and monocultures need to give way to an earth democracy supported by decentralization and diversity. The rights of all species and the rights of all people must come before the rights of corporations to make limitless profits through limitless destruction.
Free trade is not leading to freedom. It is leading to slavery. Diverse life forms are being enslaved through patents on life; farmers are being enslaved into high-tech slavery; and countries are being enslaved into debt and dependence and destruction of their domestic economies.
We want a new millennium based on economic democracy not economic totalitarianism. The future is possible for humans and other species only if the principles of competition, organized greed, commodification of all life, monocultures, monopolies and centralized global corporate control of our daily lives enshrined in the WTO are replaced by the principles of protection of people and nature, the obligation of giving and sharing diversity, and the decentralization and self-organization enshrined in our diverse cultures and national constitutions.
A new threshold was crossed in Seattle—a watershed towards the creation of a global citizen-based and citizen-driven democratic order. The future of the World Trade Organization will be shaped far more by what happened on the streets of Seattle and in the non-governmental (NGO) organization events than by what happened in the Washington State Convention Center.
The future of the World Trade Organization will be shaped far more by what happened on the streets of Seattle and in the non-governmental (NGO) organization events than by what happened in the Washington State Convention Center.
The rules set by the secretive World Trade Organization violate principles of human rights and ecological survival. They violate rules of justice and sustainability. They are rules of warfare against the people and the planet. Changing these rules is the most important democratic and human rights struggle of our times. It is a matter of survival.
Common principles...
The citizens' Seattle round of the democratization of the food system synthesized common concerns of people from across the world to ensure that the way we produce, distribute, process and consume food is sustainable and equitable. In the Third World and the industrialized world, common principles have started to emerge from people's practices to ensure a safe and healthy food supply. These principles enable us to shift to nature-centered and people-centered food systems.
- 1. Diversity rather than monocultures to ensure higher output per acre.
- 2. Decentralization and localization in place of centralization and globalization.
- 3. Ecological processes instead of industrial processes of farming.
- 4. Food rights and food security rather than free trade as the basis of distribution.
- 5. Democratic control rather than corporate control of the food system.
- 6. Patent-free and genetic engineering-free farming to ensure the respect and protection of all species and the integrity of ecosystems and cultures.
- 7. Cultural diversity in place of the global monoculture of fast foods and industrial food chains.
- 8. Small farms and small farmers in place of corporate farms and absentee land owners. This involves protection of existing small farms and land reforms to redistribute land.
- 9. Fair trade, not free trade, to ensure farmers and producers get a fair return. Trade as means rather than end, with global trade subservient to values of ecological sustainability, health and social justice.
Vandana Shiva is the author of Stolen Harvest (2000: South End Press) and Biopiracy: The Punder of Nature and Knowledge (1997: South End Press), as well as other books.