Women say NO to GATS and privatization!
Posted on January 5 2006 |
As the 6th WTO Ministerial Summit draws near, so does the noose tighten on women’s rights to access water, health and other basic services. Deeper and more expansive liberalization measures are being sought particularly on the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the first legally enforceable multilateral instrument covering 160 service sectors from childcare and education to water use and sanitation.
The core mandate of GATS is its built-in drive of progressive liberalization, or the removal of any obstacle to the supply and distribution of services. Anything deemed restrictive – such as local or national laws privileging water access by local communities or environmental safeguards against polluting water sources or free education services for economically marginalized communities – are to be removed under the GATS-WTO regime.
GATS is passed off euphemistically as a vehicle of trade in services, but it is essentially a vehicle of investments in services. It is no surpise that strong lobby groups representing big business interests have been working agressively on the WTO. There is an estimated US$5.5 trillion in potential profits to be made in the education and heatlh sectors alone. An even more critical area of interest particularly for giant European water companies like Suez and Veolia (Vivendi) is water, from which an estimated US$3 trillion could be made through water project investments in countries worldwide.
The European Union’s request to several countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines and Thailand alarmingly covers all sectors of services liberalization under GATS. This means that power imbalances in the WTO will work towards increasingly pressuring the governments of developing countries to surrender regulatory functions over sectors critical to social reproduction and to be even more welcoming of privatization.
The implications for women, as both providers and consumers of services, are enormous and far-reaching. Gender roles in society is such that the bulk of social reproductive work falls on women. Even in formal production, women are gender tracked into jobs that are basically the extension of the social reproductive tasks that they do at home and in the community. This places them in a particularly vulnerable position, a position that becomes even more precarious when governments reduce their commitments to public service provision and hand these over to private corporations driven by profit motives. For as access to basic services moves farther beyond the reach of poor families, it is women’s time and unpaid labor that fills in the gaps of service provision.
The adverse effects of privatization in the basic services is well-documented. From Africa to Asia, experiences with water privatization and the application of full cost recovery measures have resulted in rising tariffs. In turn, income-poor communities and households have had to face tragic trade-offs, giving up health, housing, education and other needs to access a critical resource. Women, in particular, lengthen labor hours that go largely unpaid, often sacrificing their personal development and health needs to take on new burdens arising from the increasing lack of government support in services provision.
The urgency for women to make their mark on the 6th Ministerial and raise their voices against GATS grows ever more strongly with recent attempts of industrialized nations to squeeze out commitments in services from the developing countries through the setting of benchmarks for services liberalization. We cannot stand as our lives and our future are being surrendered to the self-aggrandizing interests of North governments and corporations.
We say, NO to GATS! Services out of theWTO! NO DEAL in Hong Kong!
Jubilee South Asia Pacific Movement on Debt and Development
Hong Kong, December 2005
|
|
|
about us 
