Shrink it or sink it
How the corporate manifesto has been made manifest in the rules of international trade – David Ransom tells the story.

Topsy turvy terms
The trade liberalizers play with words.

Sleeping through the wake-up call
Has anything happened since the ‘Battle of Seattle’? David Ransom talks to the people he can vote for.

FACTFILE – The General Agreement
on Trade in Services (GATS)
Forced landing: Marcela Valente reports on
asset-stripped airlines in Latin America.

The glass menagerie
A breath of fresh air from a Green politician
at the European Union in Brussels.

FACTFILE – Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs)
Room at the top: Ranjit Devraj on the
Indian auto industry.

Big Business - An Internet only interview by David Ransom.

THE WTO – THE FACTS

Mario, Moore, Rockwell and me
Behind closed doors at WTO headquarters
in Geneva – bumping into the boss.

FACTFILE – Trade-Related Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPs)
TRIPping up the poor: Ferial Haffajee on the pharmaceutical giants and people living with HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

FACTFILE – The Agriculture Agreement
Where there are no subsidies: child labour, hunger and coffee exports from Kenya – Katy Salmon reports.

Shrink It or Sink it:
The Turn-Around Agenda

A world turned upside down
And how to put it the right way up – David Ransom talks to UNCTAD and to Martin Khor of Third World Network.

The lifebelt:
How to contact emergency services

What can I have been thinking of on New Year’s Day 1995? I’ve got no real excuse for overlooking the birth on that day of the World Trade Organization (WTO). And if I missed it – when it’s my job to keep an eye on such things – who didn’t?

Well, it can be a problem keeping your eyes open while contemplating the innards of world trade. Sometimes the price of freedom – ‘eternal vigilance’ – can seem impossibly high. But, to my mind, if a self-styled democratic organization is unknown to more than half the people it claims to represent, then it has no right to exist. On that score the WTO – even after the profile-raising favours done for it by the ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999 – should make itself scarce immediately.

Which is not, of course, the score that inside traders are actually keeping. For the most part they’d much prefer to keep their activities firmly under wraps. On the general principle that it’s safe to ignore what powerful people want us to hear, but essential to discover what they’d rather we didn’t, then for once it seemed worth asking them a few awkward questions and printing their replies in this magazine.

Finally, a word of thanks to Claude Robinson and InterPress Service for organizing the on-the-ground reporting about real lives.

David Ransom
for the New Internationalist Co-operative
davidr@newint.org