WUNRN
COMPOUNDED GENDER INEQUALITIES OF
THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS
IGTN - International Gender &
Trade Network - http://www.igtn.org
WTO - World Trade Organization - http://www.wto.org/
International
Gender and Trade Network
at the WTO Ministerial in Geneva
30 Nov – 2 Dec 2009
Nothing more could attest to the failure of the neoliberal dogma than the
current global crises. Pure faith in the market as the sole and most
efficient allocator of resources for society has dominated all aspects of
economic policy (finance, trade, investments, public services delivery) and
had negative consequences on people’s lives across nations, classes,
ethnicities and gender.
More than ever, the fallacy of unbridled trade liberalization as a policy
approach to achieve growth has been unmasked by the crisis. For one side,
trade liberalization processes were linked to financial services
deregulation, contributing for speculative bubbles to emerge rather
frequently, thus increasing instability. On the other side, the
liberalization of trade in goods, services and investment has meant greater
integration of the economies, without the necessary protection of local
production, people’s livelihoods, gender equality and human rights. That
meant developing countries became even more vulnerable to shocks coming from
the North. One thing the financial crisis has made clear: there is no such
thing as a level playing field. Which Southern country can compete with an
American industry bailed-out with billionaire stimulus packages? In an
unequal system, the less developed must have Special and Differential
Treatment.
In this process of growing trade and investment liberalization – that
deepened the international division of labor – gender inequalities have
played a substantive role. The search for cheap labor profited in many
countries and regions from the increase in gender inequalities – and hence
from female labor, which is instrumental to globalized production.
Furthermore, many developing countries have lost their capacities for food
self-sufficiency. The penchant for export-oriented industrialization and
agriculture without concomitant linkages to the domestic economy has also
been proven unsustainable as export demand in most developed countries fall
to their lowest levels in light of the global recession. The food crisis
has likewise taken the toll on women since food security in the household
has always been one of the socially-assigned roles for women.
Further, unsustainable patterns of production and consumption in
industrialized countries continue to stress global natural resources and
have created risks associated with climate change: the North continues to
incur an ecological debt to the South. Nevertheless, it is still those
impoverished countries in the South that find themselves compelled to export
more in order to pay off their ever-increasing financial debts.
Liberalization weakens even further the role and capacity of the state to
provide public services, thus limiting access of the poor to public
education and health care, specially women and girls as in many societies
families tend to prioritize boys education and health care when those
services are privately handled and there is a lack of resources in the
family.
Further, women’s burden is increased because, by not taking reproductive
work into account – to which women are primarily responsible –, these
development policies are based on the assumption that women’s work may be
expanded to replace the cut in public services provision.
1. THE AGREEMENT ON AGRICULTURE (AOA), FOOD SOVEREIGNTY AND THE RIGHT
TO FOOD
Trade liberalization in agriculture fostered by the AoA has diminished the
capacity of developing countries to protect their domestic agriculture from
the deluge of cheap and highly-subsidized agricultural imports from
developed countries. This has led to the bankruptcy of local food producers
and loss of food security for many small farmers and laborers in the South.
On account of their socially ascribed roles, women everywhere become default
providers of food and other needs of social reproduction in the face of
market and state failures. As production and exchange conditions become less
regulated, women are facing increased tensions as they struggle with the
work demands of both production and unpaid social reproduction.
Furthermore, women continue to have more difficulty than men in acquiring
land, agricultural credit, and market access. Women small-scale farmers
often lack the equipment required for food production on a commercial
scale. This situation reached a critical point during the food crisis and
more recently the financial crisis and the credit constraints it entails.
•Ensuring food sovereignty and the right to food for peoples and nations
should be at the heart of any rural development and trade policy.
•The WTO disciplines on agricultural trade liberalization have sacrificed
food sovereignty in favor of profit-driven transnational agribusiness. For
this reason, agriculture must be taken out of the WTO.
2. GENERAL AGREEMENT ON TRADE IN SERVICES (GATS), SOCIAL REPRODUCTION,
FINANCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES
Trade in Services has always been a fundamental issue for IGTN because the
liberalization of services had a clear impact on public provision of basic
services and therefore on women’s increased unpaid work.
Technically, services liberalization does not mandate privatization, but the
logic of the process opens the way for greater privatization. Continued
pressure for progressive liberalization is reducing the flexibility and
policy options available to developing and developed countries alike.
In the absence of public provision of basic services, women are likely to
increase their load of unpaid work in order to fulfill the gaps of services
the family cannot find in the public system or pay for in the market.
In times of crises, these risks are increased as there is an overall stress
on household budgets due to less credit liquidity. Yet, while it is now
common sense to talk about re-regulation of the financial sector in order to
avoid future speculative bubbles and credit crunches, WTO negotiations
paradoxically contain, under the Financial Services Agreement (FSA), a whole
agenda of deregulation that will do nothing but maintain “business as usual”
or worst, increase the likelihood of future crises.
Another critical issue in GATS negotiations is the liberalization of
environmental services. In a moment when COP15 is being converted to a
business fair and the environment is being negotiated as a commodity, the
WTO is once more playing a role in marketizing nature.
•Services essential to social reproduction should be excluded a priori from
GATS.
•Financial services should not be further liberalized and previous
deregulation should be revised in view of the needed policy space to respond
to the financial crisis.
•No environmental services negotiation should be undertaken in the WTO in
order to avoid the mercantilization of life in favor of transnational
corporations.
3. NON-AGRICULTURAL MARKET ACCESS (NAMA) AND AUTONOMOUS INDUSTRIALIZATION
Developing countries are being prevented from pursuing an industrialization
strategy that uses a combination of trade policies and domestic investment
policies similar to those used by developed countries when they were at
earlier stages of development. De-industrialization can be the expected
result. Local industries will collapse because of their inability to compete
with cheap foreign imports and better technology.
Women are heavily involved in many of the sectors covered by NAMA as
countries have relied on women’s work as a basis for competitive advantage.
•Stop de-industrialization through tariff harmonization and/or tariff
elimination.
•Strengthen domestic regulation and non-tariff measures that fulfill
national social objectives.
4.
TRADE RELATED ASPECTS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS (TRIPS) AND
KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
The WTO must confine itself to trade issues. Therefore, trade-related issues
that lie within domestic policy, not international trade policy, such as
intellectual property rights, must be removed from WTO disciplines.
The
restrictions on access to affordable medicines to treat endemic diseases
have negative impacts on the health demands of social reproduction.
The
most fundamental opposition to TRIPS lies in its patenting of life forms
and its direct assault on the sovereign rights and responsibilities of
nations and indigenous peoples to protect their traditional knowledge and
biodiversity. Women, as custodians of traditional knowledge, are
systematically ignored by TRIPS.
TRIPS
should be removed from the WTO.
FINALLY, it is clear that no matter how much the trade liberalization agenda
has proven to be the engine of the failed development model and to have
critically vulnerabilized developing countries, it continues to be promoted
as something to be pursued.
Trade
liberalization without the appropriate redistribution and domestically
decided economic strategies benefited only a minority, while weakening
women’s participation in both political and economic decision-making.
Given
all this, it is shocking that Global Governance spaces such as G-20
defends the resumption of the Doha Round of Negotiation as a solution to the
multiple crises that trade liberalization has helped to create and spread at
the first place. The upcoming WTO Ministerial, from 30 November to 2
December, ten years after Seattle, is a symbol of the insistence on a failed
economic and development model in urgent need of replacement.
For
all of this, we continue to say: NO TO THE WTO AGENDA! NO TO THE WTO
DOHA ROUND!
IGTN
Contact: Diana Aguiar
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