A successful global trade symphony or Monty Python’s dead parrot: should the World Trade Organisation be scrapped?

Occupy St Paul’s and TJM event:

Friday 16^th December, 5.30-8.30pm.

The eighth ministerial of the World Trade Organisation takes place in Geneva from the 15^th-18^th December. The Doha round of negotiations was supposed to make sure global trade worked in everybody’s interests. With no sign of a deal on the table, the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on Trade earlier this year likened the negotiations to Monty Python’s dead parrot (the pet shop owner insists it is ‘just sleeping’). Yet WTO Director General Pascal Lamy continues to insist that the WTO is ‘an institution that delivers’, helping to avoid protectionism and a slide into an even worse global recession.

Occupy St Paul’s and the Trade Justice Movement invite you to discuss what role, if any, there is for the WTO in the 21^st century.

Adrian Wood of Oxford University will argue that the WTO is beneficial to poor countries.

John Hilary of War On Want will make the case for scrapping the WTO and looking to new, genuinely democratic multilateral trade institutions.

Paul Spray of Traidcraft will argue that it is time developed countries nipped cotton subsidies in the bud.

Aurelie Walker of the Fairtrade Foundation will look at how multilateral trade impacts on small producers.

Ruth Bergan of the Trade Justice Movement will facilitate the discussion.

The discussion is planned to take place at the Bank of Ideas, UBS building on Sun Street (near Liverpool Street station). If UBS are successful in their move to evict Occupy from the building before the 16th, we will be at the tent city university, near the steps of St. Paul’s.