"Key provisions of the proposals which are not acceptable from the point of view of important public interests include: a prohibition of requirements to hold data locally; a prohibition of otherwise regulating cross-border data transfers; a prohibition of requiring a local presence for goods/service providers in the country; and a prohibition of requiring open source software in government procurement contracts. It is also proposed that there be no border taxes on digital products.
Furthermore, it is being proposed to effectively give the WTO jurisdiction to adjudicate whether a national technology or data regulation was “reasonable,” “objective,” “transparent,” and “not more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service.” WTO’s adjudication processes have historically tended to favour commercial interests, and giving them a blanket supervision of technology/ data regulation may go against governments’ obligation to ensure that services are operated in the public interest and respect human rights and freedoms
In addition, discussions in WTO and in so-called free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations are neither transparent nor inclusive, thus resulting in decisions that do not take into account the interests of all concerned parties. The processes are overly influenced by big business interests."
Devinder Sharma, NEW DELHI, Nov 28 2013 : "India, a country which lived in the shadows of a ship-to-mouth existence when food would go directly from the ship to hungry mouths has over the years emerged self-sufficient in food production. This historic turnaround was possible only because India had adopted the two planks of what I call a remarkable famine-avoidance strategy: providing farmers with an assured price support for their produce, and introducing a food procurement system that provided for a guaranteed market and at the same time helped get food to the poor in the deficit regions through a network of ration shops. Withdrawing the price support for farmers or freezing it at the de-minimis level of 10 percent as applicable under the Agreement on Agriculture will make farmers vulnerable to the vagaries of the market."
Global Trends by Martin Khor Monday 2 December 2013 WTO food fight in Bali? Will developing countries be allowed to promote food security schemes that buy food from small farmers and also help poor consumers? This is one the issues at the WTO’s Ministerial Conference next week.
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) has obtained from Wikileaks a complete copy of the consolidated negotiating text for the IP Chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). (Copy here, and on the Wikileaks site here: https://wikileaks.org/tpp/) The leaked text was distributed among the Chief Negotiators by the USTR after the 19th Round of Negotiations at Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, in August 27th, 2013.
Vijay Prasad: " countries like Brazil, India, China, these countries are fighting to bring their own brands to market, to bring their own designs to market, and they are being held back by a global or international intellectual property regime that prevents many of them from pushing their brands forward. I mean, one of the real tricks in the 1980s that they are most upset by was the shift in intellectual property from where you copyright not the process by which you get to, say, a sneaker but the actual sneaker itself. "
Greg Palast intervjews Lamy and Martin Khor in Geneva. "GREG PALAST: But we got our hands on a document you certainly won’t find on the WTO website; something very confidential: a secret demand of the European Union and USA, leaning on emerging nations to
Proposed negotiations on e-commerce in the WTO are inconvenient for developing countries, for our SMEs and for people in general. by Sally Burch, dec 2017
What are GPGs? Report. Definition: "The International Task Force on Global Public Goods has defined global public goods as "issues that are broadly conceived as important to the international community, that for the most part cannot or will not be adequa
"Putin, speaking at a joint news conference with the Kazakh and Belarussian prime ministers, Karim Masimov and Sergei Sidorsky, said the three countries would notify the WTO that their separate negotiations will be stopped." "Brazil, Russia, India and Chi
once the current economic slowdown is over, "we will realise that we have a food crisis" sparked by resource constraints, triggered by a growing world population and rising demand for resource intensive foods, such as meat.