NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2008
World in View
A tale of two summits
Two summit meetings in July--of the G8 and the World Trade Organization (WTO)--achieved nothing in the face of the global crises of food prices and climate change. At best they failed to adopt U.S.-backed measures that would make matters worse.
In contrast to the official meetings, real life was found only in the massive protests and other counter-actions held near the July G8 summit in Toyako, Japan--despite harsh repression by Japanese police and Customs. Many activists were denied entry into Japan, or detained for hours of interrogation. Nineteen South Korean farmers were held at the airport for 24 hours and then sent home.
Forty Japanese left radicals were arrested before the summit began. Some demonstrators and a Reuters cameraman were arrested at a peaceful protest in Sapporo. Yet this did not stop two days of protests by thousands, a Peace Walk, and a three-day People's Summit, where ideas were exchanged not only about actions but about the deep social transformations needed to address the crises.
The assembled movements immediately exposed the "regression" that the G8 tried to pass off as progress on climate change. Whereas last year's G8 summit promised to "consider" a 50% cut of greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050--still far short of the 80% reduction scientists are saying is needed to avoid runaway climate change--this year's summit omitted the baseline year, effectively cutting the goal instead of acting to cut emissions.
On the food crisis, the G8 pushed opening Third World markets as the solution, although that is widely understood as part of the problem. Specifically, they advocated completion of the Doha Round of negotiations to modify the WTO.
The latest Doha Round talks collapsed in Geneva July 29, with India and China resisting U.S.-Europe demands to effectively ban protection of farmers from sudden surges in imports of agricultural products. Such surges have been common in poor countries where markets are opened to subsidized crops from the U.S. and Europe, contributing greatly to the ongoing food crisis.
The collapse of talks brought a sigh of relief from many quarters, since the Doha Round threatened to accelerate the dispossession of small farmers, the dependence on agribusiness conglomerates, and therefore the vulnerability to more food crises and famines. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the President of Brazil, tried valiantly to save Doha through a last-minute compromise, proving once again how a "socialist" party in power in a capitalist state becomes more beholden to the capitalist plantations and agribusiness than to the Landless Workers' Movement that helped put Lula in office.
The Doha collapse reflects not only the relative weakening of U.S. power on the world stage but the pressure from below from the many revolts sparked by the world food crisis.
--Franklin Dmitryev
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