Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

The recently concluded 9^th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO WTO
World Trade Organisation The WTO, founded on 1^st January 1995, replaced the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). The main innovation is that the WTO enjoys the status of an international organization. Its role is to ensure that no member States adopt any kind of protectionism whatsoever, in order to accelerate the liberalization global trading and to facilitate the strategies of the multinationals. It has an international court (the Dispute Settlement Body) which judges any alleged violations of its founding text drawn up in Marrakesh.

) has produced its first agreement since its establishment in 1995. Trade observers have been quick to call this a historic agreement but have failed to point out that the WTO’s Bali Package is highly imbalanced in favor of developed countries and Transnational Corporations (TNCs). At the center of the Bali Package is a legally binding agreement on Trade Facilitation that removes public interest Interest An amount paid in remuneration of an investment or received by a lender. Interest is calculated on the amount of the capital invested or borrowed, the duration of the operation and the rate that has been set. customs and border procedures to put in place easier trade flows, clearly benefitting the TNCs that dominate the export-import market, but at exorbitant costs to developing countries. Data from the 2013 World Trade Report indicates how the largest TNCs dominate the global trade flows- 80% of US exports are handled by 1% of export corporations while 85% of EU exports are handled by 10% of export corporations. The asymmetry globally is even more striking - 81% of exports are concentrated among the top five exporting corporations in developing countries.

However, this is not the first WTO agreement to benefit TNCs. The 60+ agreements in place since the establishment of the WTO have rules that are tailored to fit the interests of TNCs. This new publication from Transnational Institute and Serikat Petani Indonesia details how the WTO rules provide more favorable treatment for the TNCs and how the all powerful WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM) guarantees Guarantees Acts that provide a creditor with security in complement to the debtor’s commitment. A distinction is made between real guarantees (lien, pledge, mortgage, prior charge) and personal guarantees (surety, aval, letter of intent, independent guarantee). that ruling.

The DSM is the central pillar of the WTO and makes it, to date, the only multilateral trading Market activities
trading Buying and selling of financial instruments such as shares, futures, derivatives, options, and warrants conducted in the hope of making a short-term profit. agreement with the mandate and capacity to legally enforce its free trade rules and issue compliance rulings that can involve imposing trade sanctions on governments found to have not complied.

This report makes the case for why TNCs are the real beneficiaries of the current global trade rules and how the DSM has dismantled public policy and pushed complicit governments to surrender their sovereignty for the sake of corporate interests. As the newly appointed Brazilian Director General of the WTO, Roberto Azevedo said in a Brazilian TV interview last May “I believe TNCs love the WTO and they really want the WTO to be able to lower barriers to trade, because they won’t be able to do it alone. They really won’t! They need that these negotiations take place in the WTO, for example trade facilitation. What we are negotiating in Bali now is of great interest for TNCs. I know this also because in my former position as Brazilian Ambassador in Geneva I received visits from CEOs, from important people representing TNCs that want to facilitate trade.”

For more information, please contact: lydafernanda at tni.org