Commentary: Recalling overlooked aspects of the WTO meetings in Seattle

As we mark the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Organization meeting here, the so-called "Battle in Seattle," much of the media's focus will be on the tumult that occurred in the streets.

In my view, what's often overlooked is how that week in Seattle led to an evolving citizen oversight of the WTO and an effort to make the complex issues of WTO more understandable for public debate.

The WTO, according to a 2006 New York Times editorial, had been established as an organization where "the needs of poor countries mattered little" — and it continued on that trajectory until Seattle. Today, countries such as India and Brazil, for example, are playing far bigger roles in the organization.

Much of the change that occurred in Seattle was a byproduct of a sort of "inside/outside" coordination between nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists and officials from less developed countries to pursue mutually held values. Increasingly, in the years leading up to the Seattle meeting, they had interacted in a number of U.N. arenas that were becoming more transparent and accessible.

But the operations of the WTO were not transparent and NGO participation was severely limited. Many felt these rules were undemocratic and set out to challenge them in Seattle.

One example of this process which I was involved in was as co-organizer of an all-day session of presentations on the WTO rules regarding intellectual property.

About 400 people made it through the police lines to attend the sessions at the Plymouth Congregational Church in downtown Seattle.

One of the WTO agreements, called TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property), requires that certain genetically engineered living organisms be protected by patents and allows others to be protected by other intellectual property regimes. These agreements claim that aspects of biodiversity — and even genes themselves — should be corporate monopolies instead of the common heritage of humankind.

The agreement was to be evaluated and altered, if necessary, by 1999, making it a controversial topic on the Seattle WTO agenda.

The original TRIPS provision had been drafted by attorneys for multinational corporations. African countries had united behind a proposal put forward by Kenya to abolish patents on living organisms, while many NGOs and indigenous organizations had also expressed strong opposition to the patenting of life forms and genetic material.

The session was organized by the Council for Responsible Genetics in Cambridge, Mass., the first organization in the world to articulate a position against the patenting of life forms — and thus, a distant progenitor of the myriad "No Patents on Life" placards carried through the streets of Seattle during those days.

I was a co-founder of the CRG — and of a local group which still exists, the Washington Biotechnology Action Council — raising public policy concerns about the risks and lack of regulation of genetic engineering operations.

The keynoter was Ralph Nader. Other presenters included virtually all the key people throughout the NGO world, as well as government and international officials, involved in the issue.

Dozens of similar sessions were held on WTO topics ranging from agriculture to health.

Those meetings got scant coverage in the press. But they educated large numbers of people and the media about complex issues, heightened the public debates and in some cases, contributed to the evolution of governmental views.

I am also intimately familiar with a little-known direct outcome of the Seattle events. The U.N.'s Convention on Biological Diversity — which currently has 192 members but not the U.S. — was signed at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992. Under it, countries had begun to craft a subsidiary treaty to protect diversity of living organisms in the environment from the potential risks posed by genetically engineered organisms.

I participated in all the negotiations of this sub-treaty and was present at the early 1999 meeting in Colombia where the expected adoption of a text was stymied by the U.S., Canada, Argentina and Australia — the main growers and trade exporters of engineered crops. A deadline for finalization was set for January 2000 in Montreal.

The Seattle events played an important role in heightening the tensions around these negotiations and helped push the process to a conclusion in Montreal.

The text of the "Cartagena Biosafety Protocol," as it is called, was related to Seattle in several ways, according to the chair of the sessions, Juan Mayr, the environmental minister of Colombia, and many of us who were also involved.

Canada had begun an effort to forestall such a U.N. protocol by pushing at the WTO for discussion of international rules for genetically engineered organisms to be on the Seattle agenda. This effort was derailed by the collapse of the meeting, as well as by principled opposition from African and other Third World countries and European Union environment ministers.

Mayr, who himself had been unable to enter the meetings in Seattle because of the demonstrations, wrote that the negotiators in Montreal "publicly contradicted their own trade spokesmen" and reflected the "euphoria on the streets." He credits events in Seattle for broadening interest in the issue beyond the realm of environmentalists.

Seattle also heightened NGO organizing activities for Montreal. Another NGO participant and I obtained special foundation funding to bring citizen activists from the recalcitrant countries to Montreal to confront their government representatives.

In addition, Canadian NGOs turned out large numbers of people.

In the extremely bitter cold, they built a tent encampment at the entrance to the negotiations building and dressed in butterfly outfits — the drag of choice since a study had been released suggesting that genetically modified corn might harm Monarchs. They elicited a constant stream of approving automobile honks, and definitely increased media coverage.

Canadian NGOs also helped embarrass the Canadian environmental minister into attending the final sessions, despite his earlier refusal to come. They had placed "WANTED" posters of him throughout, including on the backs of the doors of the toilet stalls. The presence of a number of EU environmental ministers also forced his hand.

At 5 a.m. on Saturday morning, Jan. 29, the final text of the protocol was adopted — one of the world's first environmental treaties.

Today there are 156 members, though the U.S., Canada, Argentina and Australia have refused to join. Without the events in Seattle several weeks earlier, it is possible that this treaty would never have been finalized.

Philip Bereano, professor emeritus of technology and public policy at the University of Washington and citizen activist, was involved with strategizing among nongovernmental organizations for the 1999 Seattle WTO meetings. He was an official NGO representative at WTO Ministerials in Geneva, Cancun and Hong Kong. He can be reached at pbereano@u.washington.edu