The free trade policy was deliberately made and disseminated as an instrument of the imperialists to preserve the colonial and semi-colonial system against weak societies and nations. It’s a condition for the survival of capitalism which is dying, continues to decay and parasitism. Since the era of the 1948 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) until the World Trade Organization (WTO) was officially established in 1994, the international negotiation forum is an area for imperialists to introduce and dictate production and financial policies that legalize plundering of the wealth of a particular nation and its labors. Even cunningly, WTO policies and regulations have become a tool of imperialist oppression to hinder the advancement and freedom of nations and people in various semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries.
WTO consisting of around 160 countries works to accelerate the free movement of capital, especially financial capital from imperialist countries to semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries as well as profit repatriation to imperialist countries without any obstacle of any sovereignty and national power. The obstacle of capital exports in form of tax, tariffs and various types of non-tariff barriers in the form of policies to protect national interests, must be removed in non-industrial and weak countries. While the imperialist countries protect their own markets very strictly and hardly through various ways and justification. It’s all aimed to fully serve the interests of big capitalists.
The WTO and its free trade policy are responsible for the continued domination of imperialist countries in food and public health sector. The WTO dictate the free trade on food through Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) which deprive independency and freedom of people to gain sufficient and accessible nutrition from healthy food. Various type of diseases raised from insufficient nutrients due to unhealthy and expansive food. At the same time, they sustained monopoly on health industry and pharmacy in a handful of powerful international monopoly capitalist. They monopolize health industries such as medicines industry, raw materials, health machinery and equipment, control of knowledge and medical technology to handling treatment for the Covid-19 Pandemic through the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS), Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and Trade in Services (GAT). But the most fundamental of all is the WTO principle. It obligates all WTO members to eliminate all discrimination on the trade in drugs and all import materials related to health without any reason. This has caused the concentration of capital for the health industry to be only in the hands of a few big-monopoly capitalists in imperialist countries. Under their financial power, they control all raw materials, machinery and equipment for drug production and health facilities even the price of health labor.
During the Covid 19 Pandemic, handful of the biggest international monopoly capitalists in the pharmaceutical sector accumulate huge profits. Medicines, personal protection facilities, vaccines to knowledge in the prevention and handling of the Covid 19 Pandemic are come from the world's pharmaceutical giants. Even in the midst of pandemic, FOORBES released individual of big capitalists who obtained enormous wealth and became part of the world's richest due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. The import of vaccine is the biggest import throughout the semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries during the pandemic. It is operated through various schemes, vaccines and its raw materials, accompanied by various concessions that threatened national sovereignty and created huge of new debts.
Sufficient, cheap and healthy food as well as health facilities and medicines are so expensive and inaccessible for people whose all of their outputs are speculated in the international market. The exchange value product of peasants and labor of working class irrelevant with food, medicines, and daily health costs.
Spin around from Uruguay Round, Doha Round, are packed with 2013 Bali Package, 2015 Nairobi Package, with same essence. Foster the illusion that free trade can really be realized as the future of the world under imperialists. With the free trade without obstacle of .. tariffs and barriers of other national sovereignty, WTO promises sufficient, healthy and cheap food as well as better facilities and health services.
We are the democratic people’s movement in Indonesia realize that Indonesian labor class are very suffering due to the Generalize System of Preference (GSP). The import duty relief of some manufactured products owned by imperialists is purposely made in Indonesia as an instrument to reduce labor prices in Indonesia and in the imperialist countries. The GSP cunningly sharpens the competition between people and nations in semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries for the United States market! For 2022, the wage of Indonesian labors is only permitted to demand of wage increase of 1,09% nationally when hyper-inflation continues to undermine real wages. The Indonesian workers are illusioned by the creation of new jobs through the existence of a free market of capital. In Indonesia today, one new employment in pharmaceutical industry needs 1 trillion rupiah of new investment! Some other manufactures need billions of rupiah investment to create one new job.
The individual small peasants and peasant-labor in Indonesia work in the backward organization of production, without modern machinery and work equipment. They are forced to produce desperately, under the big landlords, imperialist agents to fill the imperialist monopoly market, including the “virtual marketplaces”. They are working to serve “forward purchase contracts”, commodity futures markets, driving imperialist ports and logistic vessels. The CPO from Indonesia supplies 50% of the world’s needs from land that is taken from the peasants and continues to destroy the forest. The peasants work to make Indonesia the world’s largest coconut exporter, the world’s largest exporter of marine fish, the largest exporter of cocoa and coffee. In the same time, the government is forced to import rice, corn, soy bean, garlic-onion, meat, milk, eggs, sugar, salt to chicken thighs from imperialist!
Indonesian peasants work together under the WTO to create the new Jeff Bezos, while they and their families keep in tiny-dried due to malnutrition, live with wage of forty to fifty thousand rupiahs a day. Every 1,000 hectare of large-scale pam oil plantation area owned by big landlords is only available for 200 person of temporary peasant-labor with very low wages.
The WTO for us is the World Threatener Organization or the World Traitors Organization. It must be stopped. The oppressed and exploited people of Indonesia and the world must unite to stop it. The 2013 Bali Mass Movement must be multiplied, the anti-meeting movement and WTO policies around the world must be expanded and continuously strengthened. No matter how hard the people’s efforts, working hard in agriculture and manufacturing is useless if the free movement of imperialist capital still operate. There is no progress and freedom under the WTO, there is only the
Long live ILPS Indonesia
International Solidarity
End WTO!
28 November 2021
Best Regards,
International League of People Struggle (ILPS)
Chapter Indonesia
Helda Khasmy
Chairperson
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