Preparing for the WTO

With just weeks to go before global trade ministers are scheduled to gather in Qatar for a World Trade Organization meeting, Premilla Dixit is laboring 16-hour days with scores of other anti-globalization activists to prepare a counter-summit in New York City.

Working on a shoestring budget from her tiny office in lower Manhattan, Dixit, 51, is busy fielding emails, faxes and phone calls to help coordinate the gathering against corporate-led globalization.

The WTO had scheduled its meeting in the far-off Middle Eastern nation to evade the street protests that have accompanied economic summits of late, but because of Qatar's proximity to the war-zone in Afghanistan, the organization may move or postpone its gathering.

In the wake of September 11, activists had decided to temper their plans. Still, Dixit and other organizers say their message will be heard: The domination of corporate power at the expense of the public interest has gone too far. Labor, environmental, student groups, as well as scores of nongovernmental organizations have joined together to prepare three days of actions in New York and around the world.

"We feel it's critical to draw attention to the quiet tragedy of what they inflict," Dixit said from her office on Bleeker Street, at the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), an 85-year-old group founded by Jane Addams.

By "they" Dixit means not only the WTO, the international organization founded in 1995 to regulate trade between nations, but other financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Activists say the WTO emphasizes corporate profits to the detriment of social and environmental concerns, and forces individual nations to undermine the interests of their citizens.

Modern day trade deals are no longer limited to tariffs and quotas. Today, in the name of stamping out protectionism, they affect an array of issues including public health, energy and the environment. In the United States alone, WTO rules have confounded some important environmental protections, including pollution-reduction efforts and dolphin-safe tuna fishing rules.

From South to North

For decades people in developing countries have protested IMF and World Bank "structural adjustment" programs, which forced nations to cut domestic spending and squeeze social services, ultimately increasing poverty, in order to repay their international debt. As the effect of trade rulings began to reach northern countries, the movement against corporate domination spread.

Since September 11, anti-globalization activists have been regrouping to discuss the future of the movement within the new war context.

"We are already concerned about the threats from these new definitions of terrorism, some of our friends and colleagues had already been mentioned as so-called domestic terrorist groups even before September 11th, so there is a lot of concern," said Kevin Skvorak, a New York activist with the coalition Direct Action. "There's a strong commitment that we have to continue to move ahead."

Though press coverage has portrayed the activists as young white anarchists wearing black ski masks and smashing windows, in fact the mobilization is diverse and largely peaceful. There is no one single description that fits members of this movement.

Premilla Dixit, who comes from a Hindu Indian family of professionals, says she became involved because she was incensed by racial and corporate injustice, which affected her in very personal ways.

Dixit's mother is a botanist, and her father was an agricultural geneticist. Her father developed a specific strain of basmati rice, a rice that originated on the Indian subcontinent. He named the strain he had developed for Dixit's younger sister Jaya. Today, a Texas company owns the patent to several other strains of basmati, reaping enormous profits from a rice that hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers had cultivated for centuries.