Trade Politics in Flux: What Social Movement Responses?

Posted on July 6, 2017 by GJEP staff

This is an important article on trade politics from bilaterals.org. In 2004 Global Justice Ecology Project helped launch the website, along Asia-Pacific Research Network, IBON Foundation, GATT Watchdog New Zealand, and XminY.

bilaterals.org is a collaborative open-publishing website dedicated to supporting social movements fighting trade and investment deals negotiated outside the World Trade Organisation. Half a dozen people are involved in the implementing the project daily from North America, South America, Europe and Asia.

As bilaterals.org points out in this article, “The role of trade in supporting visions and realities of food sovereignty is, or is likely to be, minor if not non-existent.

…today, the militancy of more critical strands of climate justice struggles — particularly the inspirational collective leadership of Indigenous Peoples’ resistance based in anti-colonial politics and worldviews — offers real hope for possibilities beyond pragmatic liberal reformism to solve the climate crisis. Resistance to capitalism and racism is also coming from migrant workers organising across the world, often at great risk. Indeed it’s not even possible to understand migration without looking at the imperialist exploitation and undermining of many societies in the global South under colonialism. Colonialism and imperialism have created the structural conditions of dispossession, poverty and inequality – and, often, conflict – which drive many people to migrate in search of work and survival.”