Global Action Alerts

Global Alerts

The World Trade Organization Fourth Ministerial

Doha, Qatar: November 9-13, 2001

The World Trade Organization is still attempting to recover from their disasterous meeting in Seattle in 1999. The combination of the mass worldwide protests and the resistance of the developing countries to the agenda of the industrial powers have left the organization struggling to make any progress towards its vision of globalization.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the international organization charged with enforcing trade rules including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The problem is that its decisions are generally made in private, influenced by the multinational corporations and their allies in the developed countries' governments, including the United States. Given its corporate bias, many decisions favor expansion of the power, rights and dominance of the largest corporations, at the expense of smaller, local businesses from the communities they serve. WTO decisions are not accountable - the general population of the world's countries have little say in them. However, everyone has to live with the economic, environmental and social effects of these decisions, many of which affect basic things such as worker wages and health, clean air and water, and local production, prices and sovereignty.

Post-Seattle Reports

WTO: Investigated, Analyzed, Criticized by Paul Richmond of the National Lawyers Guild

Showdown in Seattle video produced by the Independent Media Center

Your Guide to the WTO and the Seattle Protests

Seattle WTO: Mobilization against Corporate Globalization - Contains a good overview of WTO issues
WTO Watch - a global information center on the WTO and trade.
www.seattlewto.org - Includes a big calendar of activist events surrounding the WTO ministerial.
Deep Dish Network - Online independent video documentary from this week's protests.
World Trade Watch - The National Radio Project, Corporate Watch, and the Institute for Public Accuracy are co-producing a series of radio programs during the WTO meetings. You may catch them on the your local radio station or on the internet.
independent media center - up-to-the-minute grassroots wto coverage from Seattle.
ZNet's WTO Center - includes a lot of excellent background articles and commentary on the WTO, plus more links.
Tom Tomorrow - Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?
The Turning Point Project has written several excellent introductions to the problems of globalization as defined by the WTO, and run them as ads in the New York Times.
Fair Trade is the alternative to corporate-led, underregulated free trade. TransFair USA is the start of such an alternative.

The Game of WTO

Think you can beat the WTO? Play this game and find out!

Start game

Also:

Global Arcade's photos
from the Seattle protests!