The organizers of the WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle are facing a wave of criticism over their choice of speakers to address a symposium for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on international trade issues to be held today at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. Adding to fierce popular opposition to their bid to launch a new trade round, the U.S. government and the WTO Secretariat are now being accused of attempting to "co-opt" and "deceive" NGOs and people’s movements with a symposium that had been billed as an effort to "engage" civil society.

At best, it is seen as a clumsy move that will only create more cynicism and anger among the NGOs it is supposed to placate.

Very few NGO representatives have been invited to join the two panels of the day-long symposium. Instead, both are top-heavy with government ministers, including the leading U.S. and EU trade negotiators, Charlene Barshevsky and Pascal Lamy, who have been given the floor to tell NGOs and delegates from developing countries why a new round will be beneficial, especially for the poor. Ministers or officials from developing countries that have been active in proposing changes to the WTO system and its rules, however, have not been invited to speak.

In keeping with this trend, the few members of civil society that have been asked to join the symposium’s two panels include free-trade academics, such as Jagdish Bhagwati, that can be counted on to lecture NGOs about the virtues of further liberalization. Academics or experts that question economic globalization, meanwhile, are conspicuous by their absence - a fact that is bound to reinforce the impression that the WTO Secretariat and the U.S. government are bent on achieving a monopoly of views to further their own agenda.

What has perhaps most angered the NGO community - out in force in Seattle - is the choice of NGO representatives invited to speak. The National Wildlife Federation and the World Wildlife Fund, whose leaders are speakers at the event, both supported NAFTA and remain "on the fence" about the WTO, says Debi Barker, Deputy Director of the San Francisco-based International Forum on Globalization. Consumers International, another of the tiny group of NGOs invited to speak, is also clearly viewed as an establishment organization. None can be said to be representative of the vast majority of NGOs, local community movements and street protesters that are overwhelmingly critical of the WTO.

Prominent environmental and social-justice leaders such as Ralph Nader and Vandana Shiva were not invited to join the symposium’s panels. Nor were any groups, such as Third World Network and Friends of the Earth, that challenge the WTO and the economic system that it promotes.

That has left the WTO and U.S. organizers of the event extremely vulnerable to the charge that the whole exercise is designed to bluff the public into believing that the WTO is now more transparent and sensitive to their concerns. If that is so, critics warn it will be a dismal failure and that NGOs and civil society will not be taken in.

Simon Retallack

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