WTO action on Nov 29th-Climate Change and Coorperate Globalization

Change Trade, Not Our Climate

Click here for the Statement from the OWINFS
Trade and Climate Change Working Group

As we mobilize resistance to yet another WTO ministerial meeting designed to promote the extension of the WTO’s powers in late November 2009 — exactly ten years after the ‘Battle of Seattle’ and just days before the crucial UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen — let us join in a common cause. To overcome the current global and systemic crises that now engulf the planet, we must collectively call for the building of a new economic order — one that puts the satisfaction of basic human needs and the implementation of all social, economic, cultural, political and human rights at the centre of its program priorities — and one that is based on models of production and consumption that respect the natural resource limits of the planet, an equitable distribution of these resources among people, and the use of clean, safe and renewable energy resources. As a major first step towards a new economic order, we insist that the neoliberal model of global trade be scrapped and replaced by an alternative multilateral trade model — one that is just, sustainable and participatory.


We, therefore, call on social movements, labor unions and civil society organizations the world over to work with us in the coming months to resist and replace the neoliberal trade and globalization regime that is causing and intensifying the global crises:

• by organizing actions and mobilizing our members to prevent the conclusion of the Doha Round of the WTO before and after its ministerial meeting in Geneva;

• by promoting and establishing a moratorium on bilateral and bi-regional free trade negotiations in particular countries and regions;

• by taking action to ensure that the WTO and its neoliberal model of trade are delegitimized as false solutions leading up to the Climate Summit in Copenhagen.

As subjects of history, it’s time to demand a global turn around now before it’s too late!

Click here for the action page