THE CANCUN MINISTERIAL CONFERENCE OF THE WTO

Joint statement of the Trade Union Congress and UK development organisations 
6 September 

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) will hold its Fifth Ministerial Conference in Cancun, Mexico, from 10 to 14 September 2003. The Ministerial will make a number of key decisions on directions for the international trading system. The overall challenge facing the international community is to make the trade system work for poverty eradication and sustainable development. To this end, we submit the following call for a just and development-friendly outcome from Cancun: 

• In view of the proposals that have been tabled at the WTO, the Cancun Ministerial should not expand the WTO's remit to include negotiations on the Singapore issues including investment. The EU must respect the opposition of many developing countries to negotiations on these issues. The UK government has a responsibility to ensure that European Commission negotiators abandon their proposals for negotiations on the Singapore issues after Cancun.
• Agricultural trade rules require significant change. The Cancun Ministerial must agree on immediate and substantial reductions leading to the phasing out of export subsidies and credits, as well as an end to the abuse of food aid, so as to prevent the ruinous dumping of subsidised produce on developing country markets. There must also be a reorientation of domestic support for agriculture in industrialised countries so as to promote rural development and environmental objectives. Developing countries should be permitted to name Strategic Products that are exempt from WTO disciplines on tariffs, to use a special safeguard mechanism to allow them to protect themselves from import surges, and to introduce a counter balancing mechanism to address the accumulated effects of high levels of production and trade distorting subsidies provided to agriculture in the North. In addition, industrialised countries should implement existing tariff reduction commitments immediately, and eliminate tariff escalation and tariff peaks in order to increase market access for all agricultural products, including processed products.
• The Doha Ministerial affirmed that the TRIPs Agreement does not and should not prevent countries from taking measures to protect public health. The Cancun Ministerial must lift restrictions on the export of drugs to developing countries which have decided to override a patent or which do not recognise drugs patents but lack the capacity to produce cheap generic equivalents. Operational measures to promote technology transfer as required in the TRIPS Agreement should be strengthened so as not to rely on the 'best endeavour' of industrialised countries. The Cancun Ministerial must also expedite revision of the TRIPS Agreement so as to exclude all life-forms from patenting.
• The WTO negotiations on services must take account of the need to allow governments the choice to manage and regulate the delivery of basic services in pursuit of domestic social and environmental objectives. Full and independent assessment of the experience of services liberalisation is vital if negotiations are to be based on evidence rather than ideology. 
• All WTO agreements must be explicitly subordinated to the human rights and fundamental freedoms contained in international human rights, labour rights and other conventions. Recognising the relationship between trade and labour rights, the ILO - as a specialised agency of the United Nations - should be granted observer status at the WTO. There must also be enhanced co-operation between the WTO and ILO to ensure that labour rights are promoted and not undermined by international trade. 
• Because world trade runs to such an extent on women's unpaid, and cheap, labour, because 70% of the world's poor are women, because women carry out the majority of subsistence agriculture, provide the majority of the labour in Export Processing Zones, carry the bulk of the AIDS burden in numbers infected and in care, have a major role in services as both workers and consumers of social services, and because women have a right to share decision-making on what sort of world we all live in, there needs to be a gender perspective in all aspects of the work of the WTO, including the Cancun negotiations.

Signatories:

Trade Union Congress (TUC)
ActionAid
Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA) 
Banana Link
CAFOD
Christian Aid
Fairtrade Foundation
Oxfam
Traidcraft
War on Want


The above named organisations campaign as members of the Trade Justice Movement for fundamental changes to the unjust rules and institutions governing international trade, so that trade is made to work for all. ()