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Meeting - World Trade Organization (WTO), to be held in Cancún, Mexico, September 10 to 14, 2003
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Mobilization Paper for the International Forum on Women’s Rights in Trade Agreements. The Forum is part of the Peoples’ Forum for Alternatives to the WTO (World Trade Organization) that will be held before and during the 5th Ministerial Meeting of the WTO in Cancún (Mexico) in September 2003.
Political Declaration of the International Forum Women's Rights in Trade Agreements - September 8th and 9th, 2003, Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico
Political Declaration of the International ForumWOMEN’S RIGHTS IN TRADE AGREEMENTS
September 8th and 9th, 2003
Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico
We, the women participating in this Forum from Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Denmark, El Salvador, Equator, France, Germany, Great Britain, Guatemala, Guyana, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Mongolia, Netherlands, Palestine, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, South Africa, Spain, Senegal, Switzlerland, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United States and Venezuela.
DECLARE
1. That the fifth ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation is being held in a global context predominated by wars, militarisation and unilateralism in various parts of the world.
2. That the world economic powers and the multinational corporations have designed new strategies to impose conditions and put pressure on developing countries through regional and bilateral agreements, which increase inequality and disadvantages, with negative impacts for the communities, the indigenous people and particularly for the women.
3. That the World Trade Organisation negotiations and free trade agreements threaten women’s human, economic, social and cultural rights as enacted in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and in various international conventions.
4. That the most vulnerable people of the world find themselves without juridical protection because of the unequal status they acquire through the signature of those trade agreements. While these become constitutionally binding for the developing countries, such is not the case for the world economic powers. Once the agreements are
signed, it is very difficult to cancel them.
- 5.
That the subjects of the discussions being held at the fifth
ministerial conference have negative and drastic effects on the quality
of life of the women throughout the world.
- Agriculture is a fundamental activity and way of life for the development of the countries, since it is the means through which billions of people and families sustain themselves. Furthermore, it is the basis for food security and sovereignty and it relates to the knowledge and resources provided and protected by women during thousands of years. ? The privatisation of public services transfers the social costs of reproduction to women.
- Treaties on trade related intellectual property rights usurp the rights of the communities to their natural resources and the traditional knowledge of indigenous women. They promote the privatisation of genetic resources and biodiversity, hinder scientific and technological advancement in developing countries and give supremacy to the gains of the big multilateral corporations.
7. That we, the women, shall promote an alternative agenda for globalization which will put women’s human, economic, social and cultural rights at the centre and will
- Ensure
food security and sovereignty for all the nations, recognize the
preponderant role of women in agricultural production and transform
gender relations in such a way as to allow the full exercise of
citizenship by women. ? Establish the predomination of international
agreements and conventions on human, environmental, labour, sexual and
reproductive rights over trade regulations and agreements.
- Promote the instrumentation of instances and mechanisms to foment democratic forms of governance between the nations and will allow developing countries to recuperate their rights to sovereignty. These mechanisms must ensure equitable forms of participation for women.
of all countries not to sign agreement which go against women’s quality of life.
We invite the People’s Forum for an Alternative to the WTO to endorse this declaration and
support as their own the demands of the women who constitute 70% of the poor in the
world.
Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico September 9th, 2003.
Translation: Mujeres Hacia Cancun
Political Strategies of the International Forum Women's Rights in
Trade Agreements - September 8th and 9th, 2003, Cancun, Quintana Roo,
Mexico
The women from 42 countries participating in the International Forum agreed on short and medium term actions, taking into account two broad consensus:
a) The promotion of the gender equity focus and the participation of women in all the
actions taking place in all spheres and levels. This means that we shall promote, among
other aspects, a balance of power in the relations between women and men.
b) Women’s strategy in the struggle for a just and equal society is based on articulating
actions for incidence with social mobilisation. Our proposals will not be attended if they
are not accompanied by actions of social pressure.
During the Forum, we analysed the themes being debated at the Fifth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation and others considered as most significant for the women’s agenda:
- Agriculture, food security and sovereignty, genetically modified products and alternative
and rural solidarity economies.
- Services: health, education, water.
- Agreements on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
- Investments.
- Militarisation and violence women.
- External debt.
- Migration.
The proposals on those themes and others were presented in the international, national and local contexts: some are directed to institutions and governments where macroeconomic
decisions are taken; others are related to the women and feminist movement and others are intended to support building alliances with the organised social movement.
The proposals cover the following five areas:
1. Building social strength, organisations and alliances.
- It is strategic to strengthen the relationship of our organisations and networks with the women in the rural and urban communities. We must elaborate strategies that will allow
us to broaden our field of action and build social power based on women as they are the
most severely affected by poverty and exclusion.
- Women’s power has been built on the strategies developed to resist the enormous power of the multinationals. We shall continue to design diverse actions in this respect.
- In order to impulse relations of power based on equality between women and men, we
shall bring forward a proposal to articulate the gender perspective in the agenda of the
organised social movement.
2. Mobilisation and social pressure.
- Social pressure activities must take place on a permanent basis.
- We shall actively participate in the mobilisations in Cancun as well as in our own
countries and in regional, national and international meetings and forums.
3. Incidence and demands on governments and multilateral organisations.
Our incidence on macroeconomic issues with negative impacts on women’s lives can be
achieved through a two-way strategy: we shall elaborate our proposals through discussions
on specific subjects such as the ones we treated in this forum: investments, government
supplies, agriculture, services, etc. On the other hand, we need to have an incidence on the general and global themes with reference to the development models and the actual
neoliberal economic policies. Knowing the technical themes and elaborating proposals in
this respect do not mean that we waive our rights to reject the antidemocratic position and lack of transparency of organisms such as the WTO, the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, as well as those of our own governments.
- Actions with the purpose of incidence and demands will be proposed in meetings and to international organisations and, at national level, to the executive and legislative bodies and local governments.
- Information on the content and impacts of bilateral, regional and hemispheric free trade
agreements is indispensable to demonstrate how they are part of a same strategy to
impose economic and trade rules against women and people’s interests. It is important
to globally link the resistance against those agreements.
4. Circulation, information and education.
- During this event and as the result of a long process of investigation of various networks
and groups, the international network of women that we are now forming has succeeded
in articulating a series of well-documented proposals. It is important that these opinions
and proposals be broadly circulated in the population and with the press.
- We must strengthen the education process and the linkage of macroeconomic themes
with the daily reality of women living in rural and urban communities. Through clear
and simple words, it is possible to demystify the economic language and demonstrate its
relation with the life of women.
-The documentation of specific cases on the impact of free trade policies throughout the
world allows us to prove the accuracy of our analysis and proposals and to explain more
clearly the macroeconomic policies.
- We must strengthen our mutual information system in order to share our experiences
and activities and the results of our investigations.
-The women’s networks and organizations have produced a large quantity of material on
investigations, diffusion and denunciations, which could be used to create a data base.
- It is indispensable to strengthen the international women’s network based on the labour of existing national and international networks, with a perspective to grow and always be inclusive of others.
5. Campaigns and priorities.
We agreed on three themes to be promoted by participting organisations from 42
countries, according to the national and regional process:
a) Water.
b) Genetically modified products and food security and sovereignty.
c) Human Rights as the framework of particular agencies of women’s organisations and
networks.
We shall demand immediate respect of our freedom of expression and circulation during the
realisation of the fifth ministerial conference of the WTO which will be held in the next few days in Cancun. The rights of the organisations to express their opinion and to manifest publicly must be respected.All those strategies constitute agreements adopted through consensus and should be promoted at in the forum and events in which we shall participate.
Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico September 9th, 2003.
Translation: Mujeres Hacia Cancun
WOMEN OF THE WORLD TAKE ON THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION
A call to action
“Reducing gender inequality is not only a goal in itself but also a major contribution to sustainable development.”
Platform for Action Fourth World Conference on Women, 1995
In preparation for the next ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), to be held in Cancún, Mexico, September 10 to 14, 2003, women all over the planet are either readying their gender proposals for presentation at the Peoples’ Forum for Alternatives to the WTO in Cancún, or they are planning to stage demonstrations and other actions in their respective countries.
The WTO, set up in 1995 to regulate international trade, operates on the basis of anti-democratic relations thereby becoming a weapon against poor countries and sustainable development. In closed-door preliminary mini-meetings, a small group of rich countries decide on laws and rules favouring their own interests; they then impose them on developing countries—more often than not with those countries’ leaders’ consent. There is no room for civil society to intervene, even when matters compromising humankind’s present and future are at stake.
As pointed out in the recent call by the Hemispheric and Global Assembly against the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) and the WTO to derail the 5th Ministerial of the WTO, countries find themselves in a context of persistent economic war. The trend is toward the unipolar control of a world where the market leads to the private accumulation of wealth and not to looking after peoples’ needs. Economic relations are thus dehumanized.
As women we are affected differentially by those anti-democratic, discriminatory measures that strengthen inequality and unjust situations. We have endured such circumstances for centuries in patriarchal societies. We are forced to join the job market under increasingly unfavourable conditions. Our unpaid workload is becoming more and more burdensome as we take over tasks related to the education and health of children, the elderly and sick people that used to be the government’s responsibility. This is just one example. Poverty is on the rise generally and we women continue to take first place in statistics on the world’s poor (70%). Violence against us is increasing because of our deteriorating economic conditions and the commercialization of our bodies.
Faced with this bleak panorama, women are more and more determined to join forces worldwide to express our rejection of a model that excludes our rights and also to internationalize our hopes and battles. Perhaps one of the World March of Women’s most significant contributions was to have strengthened the spaces for worldwide exchange between women.
This is what prompts us to search for new paths; it also fires our imaginations. In Cancún, we will hold an international forum called WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN TRADE AGREEMENTS on September 8 and 9, 2003. Speakers will come from all continents and we will be able to share our experiences, struggles and actions against unfair trade legislation and also achieve a common position on the WTO.
Given that the increase in poverty contributes to greater violence against women, as part of the Peoples’ Forum activities on the International Day of Mourning for economic, military and gender wars, on September 11, in Cancún, we will perform a stage play. The play, denouncing the serial murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, will symbolize our rejection of this type of violence all over the world. Other cultural activities specifically by women include performances by a group of women rockers and a singer. A photo exhibit using plotters will be presented at the International Women’s Forum, and other activities will showcase the status of women, our struggles and gains.
Not all women on the planet can be in Cancún of course, but ALL of us can participate in activities and demonstrations in our countries organized by the women’s movement and the social movement at large. We will mobilize to “derail the WTO,” piece together our own alternatives and demand from our governments and world leaders that they stop economic, military and gender attacks. Actions by women anywhere in the world will lend more credibility and strength to the voices raised by their sister militants in Cancún.
Together we will succeed in changing the rules of the game; we will build a fairer and more equitable world where peoples will not serve the market, instead the market will be a means to improve our status, with full recognition for our economic, social, political, cultural, sexual and reproductive rights.
In closing we want to remind our readers that, in addition to actions planned for the International Day of Mourning for economic, military and gender wars that will be held everywhere on September 11, an International Day of Action has been planned with all the international social networks in Cancún and everywhere else to derail the WTO on September 13.
LET’S ALL BE THERE!
For more information on activities in Cancún and elsewhere, visit the following Web pages:
www.cancun2003.org and www.movsoc.org
Leonor Aida Concha and Gaby Labelle, World March of Women- Mexico
Last modified 2006-04-21 02:55 PM
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