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By Aurina Chatterji In Mumbai to attend the recently concluded World Social Forum 2004, Walden Bello, activist, academic and director of Focus on the Global South, explains that forums such as these are not meant to generate action; they serve to get thinkers and analysts together to find a common thread of expression
 In the global North-South divide, Walden Bello is sure of where he stands. The director of Focus on the Global South in Bangkok, and professor of public administration and sociology at the University of Philippines, Bello is not one to mince his words. Especially when it comes to any discussion about the WTO (World Trade Organisation). "The WTO is an opaque, undemocratic and non-transparent organisation driven by a free-trade ideology which, with its defining parameters of liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation, has only re-engineered Third World economies to generate greater poverty and inequality. The WTO is simply a representative of American state and corporate interests. Its development has been closely linked to the changing needs of the United States, which has moved from supporting a weak GATT to promoting a muscular WTO as a nominally multilateral order with strong enforcement rules. The American state is very flexible in how it pursues its ends -- it can be multilateral when it wants to, and unilateral at the same time."
Excited at the mammoth turnout for the WSF, Bello is confident that such events will only help build up a movement of sorts. "I have heard cynics commenting on how such social forums are nothing but platforms for networking and discussions which lead nowhere. I would like to disagree. The forums are not meant to generate action. As of now, they must get the thinkers and analysts together so as to find a single thread of expression. It is a process of synthesising issues, problems and potential solutions. The outcome is that the debates will have an impact on the consciousness of people across the world. It will lead others to believe that, yes, another world is possible. It is the struggle of millions of people to fight the forces of globalisation and imperialism," he says. For someone who could have chosen to go into the movie business (Bello's father managed one, apart from his interest in the advertising industry, while his mother was a singer and composer), Bello's initial tryst with radicalism was a reaction against the Jesuit form of education he had to endure. "These schools in the Philippines catered to the children of the elite and this instinctively brought about an opposition to the class bias in a pre-political sort of way," he explains. Later, as Bello found himself getting involved with the nuances of world trade and the role of the WTO, he found it necessary to create a voice that could be heard above that of the developed nations. This is what led to the establishment of Focus on the Global South. Bello elaborates: "We wanted to establish an institute that would look at Asian economic, political and ecological issues, linking them to the broader picture. Examining World Bank development models and other patterns of domination made me increasingly aware that these couldn't simply be challenged at the national level. Whether it was a question of opposing the US military or the World Bank or the IMF or multinational corporations, it was crucial to begin creating cross-regional links. When the movement in the Philippines succeeded -- helped by various contingent factors -- in getting the American bases shut down in the early-'90s, a number of us warned that unless we changed the military equation in the region, the victory would not last very long. It didn't change, and today US troops are back in the Philippines with a vengeance. National movements, important as they are, have to be combined with the creation of regional and global movements. Traditional paradigms of international solidarity are no longer appropriate in the current situation." On issues such as trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs), public health and agricultural liberalisation, Bello's focus is straight and clear. "WTO director-general Supachai Panitchpakdi trumpeted a successful last-minute compromise on the contentious issue of the relationship of trade-related intellectual property rights and public health in the manufacture and import of vital drugs. Many analysts contend, however, that the compromise leans more toward protecting the patent rights of Northern pharmaceutical companies than promoting access to life-saving or life-prolonging medicine for millions of people in the South suffering from HIV/AIDS and other epidemics. It is very doubtful that it can unblock negotiations in the other areas, where North-South differences as well as internecine disputes among the rich countries are more solidly entrenched. Further, a last-minute attempt by the European Union and the United States to set up a negotiating framework to revive the stalled talks on agricultural liberalisation appears to have backfired, as developing countries like Brazil, India and China immediately responded with a paper telling the Europeans and Americans to quit beating around the bush and radically cut the high levels of subsidisation responsible for the dumping of cheap grain and meat onto world markets, putting hundreds of thousands of developing country farmers out of business," says Bello. As for solutions, Bello believes that developing countries must not allow themselves to be boxed into false choices, and start working on real alternative arrangements such as creating regional economic blocs or restructuring existing ones to serve as effective engines of coordinated economic progress via policies that effectively subordinate trade to development. Trade, Bello observes, cannot be for trade's sake. "Trade must also work for development." (InfoChange News & Features, January 2004)
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