Pascal Lamy, the EU Trade Commissioner, today visited St Anthony's College in Oxford to give a talk on the economic power of the EU. A number of activists in Oxford decided to undertake various actions to make him feel welcome.
Pascal Lamy, the EU Trade Commissioner, today visited St Anthony's College in Oxford to give a talk on the economic power of the EU. A number of activists in Oxford decided to undertake various actions to make him feel welcome.
Unfortunately, one of those actions, a demonstration outside the gates of St Anthony's didn't really materialise, due to poor turnout of people (apart from the numbers of activists inside the talk). This was quite disappointing; Lamy is an incredibly powerful man and a leading exponent of neoliberal globalisation, so for Oxford not to be able to muster a visible demonstration against him is a bit crap...especially given our successes in the past with the likes of Madeleine Albright. Obviously Lamy has a lower profile, but that is exactly WHY he needs to be protested. He is one of the men that the thousands of protestors at WTO summits are trying to get to, and that tens of thousands of police are protecting...yet when he turns up with one security guard in Oxford we don't even bother to show him how we feel!
Things went rather differently on the inside of the talk. Things got off to a good start with the distribution of spoof lecture notes about Pascal Lamy and his policies (
http://osanetwork.free.fr/download.php?view.6 ) which was accepted and read by everyone present (about 100 people). Copies were even given to the chair of the talk and to Lamy himself!
There were a number of different activists present in the talk, including both students and town residents; people from CND, the Green Party, WDM, and more. A group of student activists turned up dressed in suits and proceeded to encourage Lamy from the audience whenever he said anything positive about opening markets or privatisation. However, this didn't succeed as well as it could...it was caught between two stools; not really disrupting the talk but not really making a point, either. At times it looked a little petty; something for us all to bear in mind for next time....either engage with the debate or go the whole hog and humiliate the guy!
After a truly cringeworthy introduction from Timothy Garton Ash ('Pascal Lamy is one of Europe's great intellectuals'!!) which probably put more people off than all of the activism combined, Lamy spoke for about 25/30 minutes on the EU as an economic superpower. As expected he sounded unobjectionable enough; lots of talk about 'social justice', 'equality' and 'transparency'. Of course, anyone with a smidgen of knowledge about the man knows how much these words mean....but it was difficult to get that across to a largely credulous audience.
Then followed the questions, including some from faux 'enthusiastic' students, praising Lamy's agenda of privatisation and free trade. As might be expected from an experienced bureaucrat, Lamy proved to be skillful at not answering the questions put to him...and due to the format it was impossible to ask follow-up questions without heckling him. This was frustrating, as much of what he said consisted of total lies. Among his quotations were the claims that "the EU's trade agenda has nothing to do with privatisation" that "opening markets to the private sector is not the same as privatisation" and (my personal favourite) "the EU is not pushing for the privatisation of water provision. It is pushing for the privatisation of water DISTRIBUTION."
Oh. Well. That's alright then.
All in all, a mixed evening...while Lamy and his flunkies were left in no doubt as to the presence of 'altermondialistes' in Oxford, and to their hostility to Lamy, I can't help feeling that an opportunity was missed. This man needed to be taught a serious lesson, and unfortunately that didn't happen tonight. Next time, I propose that we drop the agenda of trying to engage with him on his own territory, and just dump a bucket of water over his expensive suit. At least then we might get an honest moment out of the arch-neo-liberal.
Unfortunately, one of those actions, a demonstration outside the gates of St Anthony's didn't really materialise, due to poor turnout of people (apart from the numbers of activists inside the talk). This was quite disappointing; Lamy is an incredibly powerful man and a leading exponent of neoliberal globalisation, so for Oxford not to be able to muster a visible demonstration against him is a bit crap...especially given our successes in the past with the likes of Madeleine Albright. Obviously Lamy has a lower profile, but that is exactly WHY he needs to be protested. He is one of the men that the thousands of protestors at WTO summits are trying to get to, and that tens of thousands of police are protecting...yet when he turns up with one security guard in Oxford we don't even bother to show him how we feel!
Things went rather differently on the inside of the talk. Things got off to a good start with the distribution of spoof lecture notes about Pascal Lamy and his policies (
http://osanetwork.free.fr/download.php?view.6 ) which was accepted and read by everyone present (about 100 people). Copies were even given to the chair of the talk and to Lamy himself! There were a number of different activists present in the talk, including both students and town residents; people from CND, the Green Party, WDM, and more. A group of student activists turned up dressed in suits and proceeded to encourage Lamy from the audience whenever he said anything positive about opening markets or privatisation. However, this didn't succeed as well as it could...it was caught between two stools; not really disrupting the talk but not really making a point, either. At times it looked a little petty; something for us all to bear in mind for next time....either engage with the debate or go the whole hog and humiliate the guy!
After a truly cringeworthy introduction from Timothy Garton Ash ('Pascal Lamy is one of Europe's great intellectuals'!!) which probably put more people off than all of the activism combined, Lamy spoke for about 25/30 minutes on the EU as an economic superpower. As expected he sounded unobjectionable enough; lots of talk about 'social justice', 'equality' and 'transparency'. Of course, anyone with a smidgen of knowledge about the man knows how much these words mean....but it was difficult to get that across to a largely credulous audience.
Then followed the questions, including some from faux 'enthusiastic' students, praising Lamy's agenda of privatisation and free trade. As might be expected from an experienced bureaucrat, Lamy proved to be skillful at not answering the questions put to him...and due to the format it was impossible to ask follow-up questions without heckling him. This was frustrating, as much of what he said consisted of total lies. Among his quotations were the claims that "the EU's trade agenda has nothing to do with privatisation" that "opening markets to the private sector is not the same as privatisation" and (my personal favourite) "the EU is not pushing for the privatisation of water provision. It is pushing for the privatisation of water DISTRIBUTION."
Oh. Well. That's alright then.
All in all, a mixed evening...while Lamy and his flunkies were left in no doubt as to the presence of 'altermondialistes' in Oxford, and to their hostility to Lamy, I can't help feeling that an opportunity was missed. This man needed to be taught a serious lesson, and unfortunately that didn't happen tonight. Next time, I propose that we drop the agenda of trying to engage with him on his own territory, and just dump a bucket of water over his expensive suit. At least then we might get an honest moment out of the arch-neo-liberal.
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10.03.2004 20:58
Pascal Lamy lying...
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FRIENDS OF EUROPE
PASCAL LAMY
10.03.04
IS THE EUROPEAN UNION A SUPERPOWER?
An inquiry into EU's impact on the developing world
Who is Pascal Lamy?
- Pascal Lamy is probably the most influential man you've never heard of - In many ways, he is the most powerful man in Europe.
- Pascal Lamy is the EU trade commissioner and leader of the European Commission's Directorate General on Trade (DG Trade)
- 1957 Treaty of Rome gave the European Commission exclusive powers to initiate European Community trade policies so, when Lamy speaks at the WTO he speaks for the whole of European Union.
- But details of the trade negotiations are shrouded in secrecy. WTO resolutions are put together behind closed doors, in the infamous 'green rooms' where only a few member states are admitted. The EU too has no allegiance to accountability: recently documents were leaked revealing the hidden EU agenda behind its liberalization requests to developing countries under GATS. Pascal Lamy himself has said: "Efficiency must come before accountability."
GATS- General Agreement on Trade in Services:
- GATS is an international trade agreement which came into effect in 1995 and operates under the umbrella of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Its aim is to gradually remove all barriers to trade in services. The agreement covers services as diverse as banking, education, healthcare, rubbish collection, tourism or transport. The idea is to open up these services to international competition, allowing the way for huge, for-profit, multinational firms.
- The European Commission in 1999 said : "The GATS is not just something that exists between Governments. It is first and foremost an instrument for the benefit of business"
But GATS will in fact mean:
- Negative impacts on universal access to basic services such as healthcare, education, water and transport
- Fundamental conflict between freeing up trade in services and the right of governments and communities to regulate companies in areas such as tourism, retail, telecommunications and broadcasting.
- A one-sided deal. GATS is primarily about expanding opportunities for large multinational companies
In theory, the GATS specifically permits developing and least developed countries greater flexibility. But in reality, the EU ignores developmental concerns and extensively targets the World's poorest countries, demonstrating a massive imbalance in the negotiating capacity of rich and poor WTO members
Pascal Lamy has said that "One of the main objectives for the EU is to achieve real and meaningful market access for European service providers for their exports of environmental services ". The EU considers 'environmental services' to include water provision: this would serve to privatize water provision, and a basic human need will be denied to those unable to afford it. .
Pascal Lamy is one of the foremost advocates of GATS
GATS represents a policy of free trade taken to extremes, which puts profit before people by comodifying all aspects and requirements of human life.
The Common Agricultural Policy
- According to the EU the CAP's aims are 'to ensure reasonable prices for Europe's consumers and fair incomes for farmers.' In practice, this constitutes a policy of applying barriers that keep out goods from developing countries and most importantly, of subsidising European farmers: this results in an artificially high pricing of products leading to the production of surplus food. This surplus is then 'dumped' onto the world market at ridiculously low cost, against which the farmers in developing countries cannot compete.
- Millions of African farmers produce food and export crops more cost-effectively than European and American farmers, but they cannot compete in this brutally skewed system. Since the 1970s, deteriorating terms of trade have cost Africa more than seven times the amount it has gained in development aid.
- For instance, thanks to the CAP, Europe is the world's largest exporter of white sugar, pushing more efficient producers in countries such as Malawi and Zambia out of regional markets. The same CAP restricts the entry of African sugar into EU markets. Mozambique, where 70 per cent of the rural population lives below the poverty line, loses $100m a year as a result.
- In Sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 300 million people live on less than US$1 a day, has been losing its share of world trade over the last three decades. In the 1990s alone, the share declined by 25%.The World Bank estimated that a cow in Europe got more than US$2 subsidy a day. To put this in context, about a billion people survive on less than a dollar a day, while cows in some parts of the world live better.
Pascal Lamy, as the EU spokesman at the WTO, is directly responsible for this policy's implementation.
Pascal Lamy advocates free trade, even in the public services, for poor countries without power but tries to exclude the richer, more powerful countries from this policy. This reveals a blatant inconsistency, demonstrating that he is, in fact, well aware of the dangers and disadvantages of free trade. Further, the way Lamy's policies privilege his vested interests and disadvantage those without power or wealth is embodied in his bullying diplomatic style.
What people have said about the EU Trade policies:
"When it comes to trade, we are totally forgotten. They talk about eliminating poverty, but why then
must they subsidise their farmers? Life is tougher than it has ever been. We no longer live on a year-to-year basis, we now live day by day 'If I could just get five per cent more than our costs, I could pay back my loans and really help my family. My three girls all sleep in the same bed' if I had more money I could buy each of them their own place to sleep."
Soloba Mady Keita, Cotton Farmer, Mali, 2003
"What is shocking is that this process that will have far-reaching and vast impact on millions of our people is being conducted in complete secrecy. It is only the leaks of the EU demands that have allowed us to get a feel of what is at stake"
Indian campaigner Shripad Dharmadhikary
"EU trade policy is fundamentally untransparent and undemocratic - it must urgently be reformed. Pascal Lamy has famously said that efficiency must come before accountabiliy - is this really the man UK want in charge of EU trade policy? Pascal Lamy is driving forward the agenda of ever greater economic globalisation, riding roughshod over social and environmental concerns - this is unacceptable."
Caroline Lucas, MEP
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