Political Declaration of the International Forum on the Rights of Women in Trade Agreements |
We, the women attendees from Belgium, Bulgaria, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Unites States of America, Philippines, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, Uganda, Turkey, Venezuela, Mongolia, Thailand, Palestine, Korea, Canada, Guyana, France, Cuba, Austria, Argentina, Italy, India, Switzerland, Germany, Costa Rica, Guatemal, Bolivia, Holland, and El Salvador DECLARE 1. That the fifth ministerial of the World Trade Organization held in Cancun is celebrated within a global context marked by an atmosphere of war, militarization and unilateralism in several regions of the world. 2. That the big economic powers and the multinational corporations have unfolded new strategies to condition and pressure the developing countries through regional and bilateral agreements that deepen the inequities and disadvantages that impact negatively on the communities, indigenous peoples, and especially women. 3. That the WTO negotiations and the free trade agreements violate women's human, economic, social, and cultural rights consigned in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and in multiple international agreements. 4. That the least favored populations of the world are legally unprotected because of the unequal status acquired in the aforementioned commercial agreements. While for the deveoping courntries, these agreements gain constitutional characters, the same is not true for the big economic powers, and once the agreements are signed it is very hard to cancel them. 5. That the themse hat are discussed int he fifth ministerial conference impact negatively and drastically on women's quality of life in the planet. Agriculture is an activity and a fundamental form of life for the development of countries, since it constitutes the means for subsistence of billions of persons and families. It is also the basis of sovereignty and security of nourishment, and is related with the know-how and enrichment brought by and protected for thousands of years by women. The privatization of the public services transfers the social costs of social reproduction to women. Healthcare, water, and other services are a public responsibility of governments, and thus cannot be converted into simple merchandises by the WTO agreements. The agreements on intellectual properties related to trade, usurp the rights of communities to their natural resources and the traditional knowledge of indigenous women; the agreemetns favor the privatization of genetic resources and biodiversity, inhibit scientific and technological development of the developing countries, and give supremacy to the income of transnational companies. 6. That the so-called "new themes" such as investment, competition, government acquisitions, and facilitation of trade are not to be opened to negotiations because they will induce the impoverishment of developing countries and contribute to the genderation of more obstacles to gender inequities that are to be overcome. 7. That women will promote an alternative agenda to globalization that centers on human, economic, social and cultural rights of women, in which:
We convoke the Forum for an Alternative Front to the WTO to join in this declaration and adopt the demands of women in this declaration that constitute 70% of the world's poor.
9 September 2003,
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