WTO And Its Impact To IP Culture, Identity, Survival

"I am Jiten Yumnam from the Centre for Research and Advocacy in Manipur. Today we join the Global Peoples Day of Mobilization against the World Trade Organization.

The World Trade Organization has promoted a neoliberal agenda promoting neoliberal globalization, privatization, deregulation of policies all over. It has affected many Indigenous Peoples across Asia and even in my part of the world here in Manipur in the north east part of India.

With the WTO’s guidance, countries like India are pursuing a neoliberal economy which subsequently increased foreign direct investment which also increased the corporatization of lands and resources.

What we are saying is, with the formulation of neoliberal policies, with the increase and promotion of international financing institutions, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, there is an increase in corporatization.

There is an increase in the involvement of multinational companies in building large dams targeting our rivers and also increased in mining of our lands and resources.

Also, there’s an increase in oil exploration and large infrastructure projects.

These are all intended to plunder and exploit our rivers, our forests, our minerals.

This has also led to massive human rights violations and displacement of Indigenous Peoples from their lands and from their own livelihoods.

The increased corporatization abetted by the WTO is also an increased threat not only to the livelihood but to the culture, ways of life, identity and basic survival of Indigenosu Peoples.

For many of the Indigenous Peoples, we depend on our land, on our rivers, on our forests for our very survival. This relationship of land is actually important not just for the present generation but even for the coming generation as Indigenous Peoples experience a very serious concern with the neoliberal agenda which has been reinforced and promoted by the WTO.

It is not just targeting our lands, but also the neoliberal agenda in agriculture for example, and the free-trade agreement has also led to dumping agricultural products controlled by corporate bodies.

This has undermined Indigenous agriculture and traditional forms of subsistence and increasingly this has also contaminated our land and affected our health.

Ultimately, the WTO agenda has negatively impacted not just on the land, not just on the livelihood, not just on the survival of the Indigenous Peoples, but it has also affected the very culture and identity and also the inter-generational survival of our people.

We call for an end of the WTO! We join in the calls for a People’s Trade Agenda!"

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• Watch the November 30 global day of action “Forging Solidarity for a World Without WTO” and the November 24 “A Future Without WTO! Webinar on the Fight VS World Trade Organization!” organized by the People Over Profit (POP), International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS), People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty – Global (PCFS), Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN), Ibon International and IPMSDL.

• Read and download “Profit In The Time of Pandemic: How Big Pharma benefitted from the COVID-19 crisis, and why the TRIPS Agreement should be scrapped” from APRN.

• Free publications! “The TRIPS Waiver and a Sustainable, People-Centered Recovery” from Ibon International.

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