This space gathered more than 250 participants in a huge room where DAWN and the Gender and Trade Network called for a mobilization and the organization of resistance actions against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Free Trade Agreements (FTA), asking to build alliances of solidarity and to join efforts in preparation of the “Global Action Week against the WTO” from December 8 to 15, within the framework of the XI WTO Ministerial Meeting held in Argentina.
Flora Partenio and Corina Rodríguez from DAWN explained how the WTO discussions bring setbacks in terms of labor rights and turn issues and spaces that were outside these operations, into objects of profits. For example, resources such as water or digital trade that hides a huge control over world databases, together with consumption habits and how this later becomes marketable. And how companies will benefit from a framework where they remain unregulated and even the States will not be able to control the handling of these databases that include issues such as environment and health.
DAWN explained that, in the face of free trade, the Feminist Forum emerges as a counterforce and alternative, aiming at feminist training actions to consider the importance of having tools against a new free trade agenda and to think about the forum as a space for the exchange of experiences among people coming from different parts of the world, fighting against extractivism, challenging the corporate power.
The idea is to resume the “Say no to ALCA” campaign organized before Bush’s arrival, to rebuild a new Peoples’ Summit to work on the central themes, trying to build alternatives in the face of WTO. In this sense forums will be organized on: food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, labor rights, health, etc. Thinking on the alternatives from a feminist perspective means to think how the feminist economy connects with other alternatives to give different views on the world of work, challenging work precariousness, informality and flexibilization, etc.
A feminist perspective is necessary to face the package of reforms taking place in the region that are tearing down the historic achievements of the movements in terms of social protection, health, education and labor rights. These reforms set the ideal conditions for the advance of this new wave of investment agreements.