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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): Order. Several hon. Members have asked me when they might be called to speak. I have not been able to assist them until now, but as six more hon. Members wish to speak, if each of them takes 12 minutes, we should be just in time for the wind-up speeches. I am in the hands of the hon. Members concerned; if they speak for longer than12 minutes, as they are entitled to do, someone will be disappointed.
5.11 pm
Mr. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North): In a spirit of negotiation, Mr. Deputy Speaker, may I offer you 10 minutes? That will allow others to go on a bit longer as I am sure that they will have much to say.
The World Trade Organisation is portrayed as trying to sort out the problems that face the poorest peoples of the world. However, some figures may depress those who claim that increasing free trade around the world helps the poorest. Since the Uruguay round, world trade has increased by roughly £200 billion. Some 70 per cent. of the benefits have gone to industrialised countries. Transnational corporations control 70 per cent. of world trade and 80 per cent. of all foreign investment. One third of developing country members of the general agreement on tariffs and trade earn most of their foreign exchange from agriculture, and a fifth or more of it from textiles and clothing--the two sectors most prayed against by the richest countries of the world.
Since Uruguay, the reality has been a rapid shift of power and wealth from the poorest countries to the richest. To say that benefit has been fairly spread is to fly in the face of reality. All that my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) said about the plight of small farmers in the eastern Caribbean could be repeated 100 times for countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa in which agricultural production has been damaged by the import of western food, and where manufacturing industry is at a standstill in countries not allowed to sell their goods elsewhere. Yet those countries are told that the most important thing in the world is to pay off their debts and adopt the programmes of good governance ordained by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
As we reach the end of the 20th century, I see a bitterly divided world. The gap between the richest and the poorest has never been bigger, and it is growing fast. The poorest people in the poorest countries face an ever-tightening spiral of worse living standards, worse education and worse public services. They also face greater investment of multinational capital as it exploits the low wages on offer.
The global environment is being seriously damaged. Sustainable agriculture is best performed by small farmers who understand the environments in which they work.
The Jamaican and Caribbean banana producers described by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington have practised sustainable agriculture for several hundred years. The prairie-type farming techniques of the big banana producers in central America and Colombia devastate the environment with their high-intensity use of pesticides and herbicides. In the long term, they are also extremely damaging to the ecosystem. They have destroyed rain forests to ensure that sort of production, whereas the small farmers that my hon. Friend described work in sympathy with their environment and have a sustainable form of living. Those issues are very important.
Likewise, the ever-present demand that we should rapidly increase world trade means more travel--more ships and more aircraft. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong when vegetables are air-freighted from the poorest countries, such as Zambia, to European supermarkets to make money for certain companies, but children in Zambia are going without; and when children and others are doing badly in such countries. There is something badly wrong with an economic system that encourages that sort of nonsense.
We need to consider what could be possible and what needs to be done post-Seattle. I have some questions, with which I hope the Minister will be able to deal, if not now then at some other stage.
Why did the Seattle conference become such complete chaos? Why was the American negotiator also the chairman of the conference? Why did that negotiator systematically exclude large numbers of southern and poor countries from any reckoning? A large number of non-governmental organisations were present in Seattle to protest legitimately on behalf of the poorest people of the world--after all, a quarter of the world's population lives below starvation level and has a right to be heard.
However, in the home of Microsoft and Boeing, the Seattle police, with riot gear and all the rest, destroyed any rights of democratic protest. The protesters were then described as undemocratic people who were trying to disrupt the conference; the undemocratic people were in the conference, excluding the poorest in the world. The representatives of the poorest in the world and, interestingly, of many American trade unions, were on the streets of Seattle seeking justice. We should ask serious questions about why all that came about.
Many people have written a great deal about the north-south divide and how it is to be dealt with. A recent edition of "Third World Resurgence" contained a splendid article by Martin Khor from Malaysia, who described exactly what it means to the poorest countries when the WTO lectures them on competition. It is not interested in competition in those countries; it is interested only in the rights of the biggest global corporations to behave as they wish in the poorest countries. That is what the multi-national agreement on investment--that ill fated agreement, which sadly, is no more--was trying to achieve. I detect that the Seattle round was an attempt to bring back that same agenda for the poorest people.
After the failure of Seattle, Friends of the Earth sent round a memo, which I am sure many hon. Members have. It sets out a series of questions and issues with which it wants the Government to deal. First, it wants a
review of United Nations conference on trade and development and WTO procedures, to find out whether they genuinely represent the needs of the people of the world.
On corporate control, it seems that, post-cold war, the United Nations has largely abdicated any responsibility for controlling what global corporations do, and most national Governments have abdicated their responsibility for trying to control such corporations. In fact, countries are in competition to offer the biggest tax incentive, the longest tax holiday and the largest amount of free land, with the least labour regulation, the least environmental control and the least child protection, to entice these greedy global corporations in, one after the other.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr. George Foulkes):
Does my hon. Friend agree that that is why we need some multinational agreement?
Mr. Corbyn:
I am not against multinational agreements; I am against an agreement that is designed by, and to benefit, the biggest businesses. That is why I am repeating for the record the issues that Friends of the Earth raised after the Seattle summit.
Friends of the Earth wants to keep investment out of the WTO. It mentions the serious problem of the reform of agricultural procedures, makes a crucial point about intellectual property rights and genetic modification technology and refers to a multilateral environment agreement. The latter is particularly important.
The Rio summit on the environment was seen as a turning point--it was seminal, in that all countries were represented there. They agreed that there were finite limits to the amount that could be taken out of the earth and to the amount of pollution that the atmosphere could take, given its long-term effects. Unfortunately, following the Rio summit, the UN office on multinational corporations was closed. Almost automatically, all economic thinking, ideas and controls were transferred from the limited democracy of the UN system to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund--both organisations are accountable only to the richest groups in the world.
I am glad that the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry suggested that there would be some support for the increase of capacity-building in the world's poorest countries, so that they can negotiate effectively with companies and other countries, and that there would be some more WTO money for that. We must ensure that the poorest people in the world have a voice in those negotiations. We need to control the world's economy; we should not merely make the world fit for big businesses to operate in. There should be a moratorium on WTO disputes. The US attitude towards the banana conflict--and many similar matters--suggests the uses to which WTO power is put.
My final remarks relate to labour standards and employment throughout the world. The International Labour Organisation was set up after the first world war. It was a triumph for international trade unionism--the principle of basic labour standards all around the world had been achieved. However, many of the ILO conventions--limited though they are--are ignored. Many of the people who work--often at arm's length--for the world's big businesses enjoy no trade union rights
or job security. They have none of the rights that we would expect as a norm in western Europe. If we do not do something about that, employment practices in the industrial countries will also be under threat, as big business moves its interest back to those areas.
I point out to those who say that we should do nothing that it is wrong to sell at high prices in Oxford street all the accoutrements of modern life--rugby balls, footballs, sports shoes at £60 or £70 a pair--when they are made by children in third-world countries who earn £1 or $1 a week. It is right to take sanctions against those countries which exploit children throughout the world. We cannot shrug off that responsibility; we must get involved. We should also pay attention to the practice in many countries of establishing tax-free economic zones for big business, while operating a no-go area for trade unions.
Finally, I draw the House's attention to an excellent article in yesterday's Guardian by Vandana Shiva--a brilliant writer. She stated:
"We want a new millennium based on economic democracy, not economic totalitarianism. The future is possible for humans and other species only if the principles of competition, organised greed, commodification of all life, monocultures, monopolies and centralised global corporate control of our daily lives enshrined in the WTO are replaced by the principles of protection of people and nature, the obligation of giving and sharing diversity, and the decentralisation and self-organisation enshrined in our diverse cultures and national constitutions."
We have an opportunity to do something to make the world a better place. Seattle did not achieve that. We have an obligation to try again in a much more democratic and open framework than was presented at Seattle.
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