For an institution that seeks to introduce a rule-based regime of global trade, ostensibly through civilised consensus between member states, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) provokes a fair degree of organised acrimony. The protests that routinely accompany WTO meetings are largely due to the unequal access of different groups to the negotiating process. Groups of people who do not belong to the economic mainstream are deemed to have their interests represented by the official delegates of their respective countries to the global trade body. On the other hand, a substantial volume of global trade, particularly in the services economy, today, is overwhelmingly dominated by gigantic transnational corporations, which constitute a systematic lobby with privileged access to the negotiating process. Consequently they are able to influence the agendas of WTO elites like the EU, the US, Canada and Japan.
There is of, course, no guarantee that equal access will produce equitable outcomes. On the other hand, the preponderant influence of oligarchic cartels is guaranteed to rig global trade policy in ways that threaten the already fragile livelihood environment of large numbers of people. The diehard supporters of the global order, like The Economist and the bulk of the mainstream Western press tend to focus all their attention on the theatrics of the protests against multilateral bodies. The reasons are obviously self-serving. Well-off Western protestors present an easy target for caricaturing the criticism against corporate-driven globalisation. By stressing on the idiosyncrasies of these globally-publicised agitators, including the alleged paradox of affluent first-worlders protesting on behalf of poor third-world natives, the need to examine in any detail the effects of the multilateral policy regime is dispensed with.
This trivialisation is necessary to sustain the fiction that predatory globalisation will bring universal benefits. Multilateral elites professing so much concern for the poverty-stricken cannot afford to dwell at any great length on the numerous protests their laboured magnanimity evokes among the natives of the underdeveloped world. Though they do not get their share of attention in the international media, there have been militant protests in several countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America against domestic policy changes, prescribed by donors and willingly accepted by client-regimes. These policy changes have been substantially along the lines envisaged under the WTO´s liberalisation of services agenda, which is merely an euphemism for handing over the supply of essential services, unhindered by regulation, to private corporations. Such protests have taken a combative turn as states attempt to quell popular agitations through armed force and clear the way for corporate control.
For South Asia, there are lessons to be learnt from recent developments in Africa and Latin America, where the consequences of the surrender of essential services to corporate interest have been drastic. Water has been one of the main targets of corporate attention and Africa has been at the receiving end of some cutthroat multi-lateral intervention. Both Mozambique and Tanzania have privatised water supply under threat from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In 1999 Mozambique had to sell of 70 percent of its water services to European multinationals as a precondition for debt relief. Water utilities across Africa have been brought under the "full cost recovery" model, under which those who cannot pay their water bills are left out of the supply loop, besides also being evicted from their homes. Since 1994, in South Africa alone, over 10 million people have been denied water services and some 2 million have been ousted from their homes for non-payment of water dues. This failure to pay is not unusual since tariffs have increased dramatically ever since water was privatised. For instance, between 1994 and 1996, in the black townships of Fort Beaufort, service charges have increased by 600 percent. As a result of such extortionary rates the consumption of drinking water from unsafe sources has increased.