Readers Write: Hong Kong WTO Edition

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted December 22, 2005.

Note: Staff writer Joshua Holland's excellent coverage of the Hong Kong WTO meeting was made possible because of the generous donations from AlterNet readers who picked up the tab for his trip. Thanks again to all of you who contributed for our WTO coverage.

Last week, I attended the World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong. The air was filled with tension inside the convention center, as rich and poor countries with very different economies struggled to find common ground. It was just as intense outside on the streets as thousands of grassroots activists laid out their grievances against the WTO.

AlterNet readers had questions to ask and plenty of their own observations to make. Some were in the comments, some came to my e-mail box. The following is a list of responses to some of them.

Qrswave asked: "What happens to the people of developing nations if this all falls apart?"

JH: The sword hanging over the developing countries' heads from Secretary-General Pascal Lamy's opening speech to the last night's action in the green rooms was that if a deal didn't get done, the WTO as an institution would be endangered.

Many of us think that wouldn't be a bad thing -- that the WTO system is beyond reform. But most of the leadership of the developing countries are afraid of the answer to Qrswave's question: namely, they don't want to find out what would happen if there were no forum in which they could bring pressure on the wealthy states to play fair.

The emergence of a large new bloc of countries working towards common goals -- the "G-110" -- may be part of the equation. As Ben Lilliston of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy said, "why blow up the system after all that work" finding common ground?

Julz2005 said of my report that there wasn't wide-spread violence by protesters and the police overreacted with plenty of tear gas and not much visible logic: "My observations exactly. I was as close to the HK convention centre as I could get last night. Stayed there for a couple of hours but couldn't get anywhere -- the area was totally locked-down by hundreds of riot police.

"These reports capture my experience here too: the media-exaggeration (especially the over-the-top local coverage: feels like the news angle was pre-written months ago), the weird police actions and preparations, and the whole feeling of the event."

JH: I've received several e-mails from representatives of groups that had members among the 900 people detained by the police Saturday. In typical fashion, just 14 have been charged with anything so far. Chief Timoney in Miami popularized the expression, "you may beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride" -- meaning police can arrest as many as they want and then drop the charges later.

The following from e-mailer Asha, who is with the Asian Pacific Women's forum on Law and Development (APWLD):

"In the middle of the night, 900 WTO protesters were arrested, among them around 45 Thais and around 20 Indonesians, 5 of which are women. Yeni Rosa Damayanti was one of the women leading the Women's March Against WTO two days ago. She is now one of the detainees and is our sole contact for the Indonesians detained. Yeni has been sending SMS messages to APWLD members updating us of their situation. She has informed us that the Indonesians have been moved by police vehicles from the Kwun Tong court . At the time of writing, the Indonesians are being held in an undisclosed building and have not been given any food or water since the time of arrest.

"They are yet to be informed of what building it is and where it is located. It is uncertain as to whether this non-disclosure is due to a language barrier or if it is a deliberate tactic of non-disclosure of information. We believe that this is the Hong Kong Government's way of weakening the intensifying resistance against the WTO. The anti-WTO groups had been planning on holding a large united rally today at 2pm. This is likely to be a method of dispersing the strength of the international movement against WTO."

Chaoslegs wrote: "I would like to know about the intellectual property issues, particularly the drug patents, and those awful genetic agricultural patents mentioned in that other AlterNet article today, 'The Gene Rush.'"

JH: The reason I didn't have much on this is that the intellectual property deal was put on the back burner during Hong Kong.

Prior to the meeting, we saw what has become a regular ritual: a grand announcement that they had successfully dealt with the "medicines issue" in such a way that the poorest countries would be able to buy generic drugs for killers like AIDS and malaria. We first heard that in 2003 before Cancun.

The problem is, as usual, in the details: the process of getting an exemption to the intellectual property rules to produce a generic drug is cumbersome, and based on a drug-by-drug and country-by-country basis that, according to Doctors Without Borders, "discourages economies of scale and slows down price reductions." The NGO notes that "since 2003 we have tried to place orders under the [2003] decision" but so far "not one patient has benefited from its use" and only four countries -- Canada, Norway, India and China -- have adopted the measure in their domestic laws. In other words, the medicines deal has resulted in a hollow press conference.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at AlterNet.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »