Dec. 19 - Negotiators Put On Brave Faces as WTO Ministerial Collapse is Narrowly Averted

Statement of Lori Wallach, Director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch

Negotiators Put On Brave Faces as WTO Ministerial Collapse is Narrowly Averted by Papering Over Divides, Punting Controversies Back to Geneva

Retrograde Doha Agenda Steers Towards More-of-the-Same, while Decade of WTO’s Negative Results has Generated Intense Public Protest, Demand to Change Course

Negotiators’ attempts to characterize this summit as a success mainly reveals the vulnerability of the WTO process, given that the most significant deliverable here was simply avoiding collapse of yet another WTO summit. Only one out of dozens of outstanding substantive negotiating issues was resolved.

This text is really bad news for most people because instead of changing the existing WTO rules now causing serious damage, this text continues WTO talks on a course in which the options range only between gruesome and horrible.

Read the entire statement.

Leer la declaración entera en español.

More Information

• For more information on the 2005 WTO Ministerial in Hong Kong, click here.

• To read a new briefing paper, "Revealing the Empty Promises of the U.S. "Development Package," click here.

• To read about Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch criticizing the WTO "trade" model in the mainstream media, click here.

• To read Public Citizen's fact sheet on the Hong Kong Ministerial, click here.

• To TAKE ACTION against the WTO, click here.

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