Trade Is War

[polly7]

The West's War against the World

by Anthony Tarrant / May 15th, 2015

As it turns out, Jean Ziegler – author, lecturer, and United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food 2000-2008 – writes a far more concise review of Yash Tandon’s latest book, Trade is War, than I can. Fortunately for me you’ll have to buy the book to read Ziegler’s powerful assessment as it serves as the preface to Tandon’s vital, timely, and unflinching chronicle of world trade as one of the West’s most violent weapons used in its tireless campaign of imperial warfare on the global South.

Deeply and uniquely qualified to “seize the narrative”, Tandon sets about methodically dispelling the narcotic fog of propaganda surrounding neocolonial trade policies generated by the West against the rest. Ugandan by birth, Yash Tandon’s decades spent in global, regional and bilateral trade negotiations on behalf of his own country as well as Kenya and Tanzania has placed him at almost every World Trade Organization (WTO) summit since the first one held in Singapore in 1996.

Amidst the ceaseless welter of colonial narrative streamed and televised like an IV push into living rooms, tablets and cell phones everywhere by corporate media on the very threshold of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), the African incarnation TIPA and its European analog TTIP, Tandon’s call to arms declares with burning sincerity, “If you do not write your own story, you have no right to independence”. If that’s not clear enough, then perhaps the last sentence of the first paragraph on page one of Tandon’s introduction sufficiently lays bare his thesis: “The WTO is a veritable war machine”.

The next 167 pages – and 18 pages of end notes – are a journey of painstaking historical analysis recounting colonial conquest and plunder whose trajectory brings us to the savagery of extractive neocolonial trade policy in present day Africa generally and the countries of East Africa in particular. Africa is but Tandon’s own historical wellspring yielding up from her aching heart the endless supportive examples drawn from his own lived experience on the front lines of regional and global trade negotiation. The topic of Trade Wars is of truly planetary scale impacting the Least Developing Countries (LDC’s) to the freshly industrialized BRIC nations defending themselves as best they can.

Tandon shifts focus to tactics the WTO deftly utilizes to subjugate the weak such as the proliferation of intellectual property laws (IP) designed to protect big pharma and global seed monopolists like Cargill and Monsanto. This has been — and continues to be — a significant focus of trade policies hammered out in WTO “boiler rooms” behind locked doors well out of public view. As Tandon puts it, “The commodification of ‘knowledge’ – or, turning knowledge into the private property of global corporations – is a product of the emergence of capitalism in Europe”. And, “In the case of hybrid seeds, it is no longer a question of an absence of scientific evidence. There is ample evidence showing that the lives of millions are at risk in order to maximise profits for global mega-seed monopolies”.

Full article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/trade-is-war/

[bemildred]

1. KnR.

Capitalism is War.