The Battle of Seattle in 1999, the global campaign to stop the GATS 2000 negotiations, the launch of the never-finished Doha “Development” Round, the crisis-ridden ministerial in Cancun in 2003 and Hong Kong in 2005 exposed the failures of neoliberalism and corporate globalisation and challenged the WTO as a vehicle for advancing that agenda.
The Public Forum was sold as a space for debate and discussion that showcases multiple positions and voices. It never reached anywhere near that ambition.
The programme and choice of participants was tightly controlled by the WTO Secretariat, and there was no funding to support those most affected from the Global South to attend and be heard. Publications were skewed to reflect the voices the Secretariat saw as important to its agenda, silencing those critics whose message and analysis spoiled the glossy image the WTO sought to promote. Some of those same critics are still around today with the same message, because behind the rhetoric of “inclusivity” nothing substantive in the WTO has changed.
So manipulation of the Public Forum as a propaganda tool for the WTO is nothing new. But we are seeing increasingly brazen moves under the current Director-General to exclude any critical dimension from the Public Forum and use it as a propaganda tool. The WTO dominates the programme, organising over half the time slots in plenary and leaving outside voices to jockey for attention in the remaining time slots, which are packed with up to 12 simultaneous sessions.
The time slots crowded with multiple simultaneous sessions also include WTO-organised panels not shown above. And many sessions are dominated by corporate-funded “think tanks” and massive industry interests based in the Global North, including the Chamber of Commerce, BusinessEurope, and Philip Morris, along with the World Bank, World Economic Forum, OECD and others, leaving little space left for public interest organizations.