Protesters call for trade reforms before WTO meeting

Mark Wilkinson / Reuters 1nov01

WASHINGTON - Critics of the World Trade Organization will press for trade reforms during the group's meeting in Qatar next week, despite the Gulf nation's ban on assembly and street protests, advocacy groups said yesterday. Although the groups will not be allowed to protest in Qatar - one person from every organization that applied was given a visa - they will hold news conferences and seminars during the ministerial meetings, said Lori Wallach of Public Citizen.

The official U.S. delegation to the Nov. 9-13 gatherings on the Arabian peninsula will itself be severely curtailed because of security concerns after the Sept. 11 hijack attacks. Many U.S. business groups also chose not to attend or to scale back.

Street protests will, however, be held elsewhere around the world - including New York, Washington, Paris, Tokyo, New Delhi and Toronto - to coincide with gathering in the Qatari capital of Doha.

Their aim: to oppose a new round of trade negotiations and call for reforms of international trade rules to better take into account the needs of poor economies.

"We believe that strong international rules are needed to manage trade," said Severina Rivera of the British charity group Oxfam International.

"But the current rules favor narrow business interests of the large economies and their large corporations at the expense of poor men and women," she said.

Oxfam, and other non-governmental organizations, including Greenpeace, called on the WTO to refocus agricultural trade rules, improve market access for developing countries and "put people at the heart of trade negotiations," Rivera said.

Demands also included reforming drug patent agreements that make it difficult for developing economies to negotiate access to affordable drugs, especially medicines that are desperately needed to curb the AIDS pandemic that, according to World Bank data, has infected 25 million people in Africa alone.

Some had hoped that the anthrax scare in the United States would have made the U.S. government sympathetic to the need to give developing countries access to affordable drugs.

But as the United States negotiated deals with Bayer for cheaper Cipro - an antibiotic used in the treatment of anthrax - Rivera said the U.S. stance on the issue had not changed.

"We had hoped that the issue of access to the patented anti-anthrax drug Cipro would make rich country governments more sensitive to the needs of developing countries," Rivera said. "But the latest reports from the WTO in Geneva indicate that the U.S. has not budged an inch."

Protesters are scheduled to take to the streets of Washington today to demand that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick rectify the WTO declaration on drug patents to make access to drugs easier for developing countries.

The series of upcoming protests will be the first major demonstrations since anti-globalization protests in Genoa last summer, where one activist was shot dead by police. They also come after a string of protests in Seattle, Quebec City, Gothenburg and Prague, which saw skirmishes between demonstrators and police.