|
'GRANITE State Launch
Meeting in West Bengal'
May 13,
2005, Press Release
“India, I must
say, displayed tremendous guts to agree to become a
founder-member of so important and complex an organisation
as GATT in 1948 within just a year of its independence,
when its strengths and weakness in the field of
international trade were yet to be clear,” commented Dr
Asish Ghosh, eminent environmentalist and Director,
Society for Environment and Development, Kolkata. He was
delivering the keynote address at a meeting organised by
Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS) to launch their
project ‘Grassroots Reachout And Networking in India on
Trade And Economics’ (GRANITE) in West Bengal, today at
the Rotary Sadan.
Dr Ghosh
emphasised that the WTO rules were patently inequitable
and were biased towards the developed countries.
Developing countries like India face difficulties in the
face of the developed countries’ attitude of side stepping
the WTO rules to their advantage. He cited the issue of
agricultural subsidy in the US.
In the morning
session entitled ‘State Agricultural Policy, WTO and
People’s Livelihood’ Dr Debal Deb from the Centre for
Interdisciplinary Studies, cited examples of degradation
of the environment and loss of livelihoods in the name of
‘free trade’. He highlighted the case of patents being
taken with impunity for some of our traditional seeds etc
like pepper, jackfruit seed and such others. He also gave
a litany of laws detrimental to India’s poor but forced
upon to meet WTO requirements. Swapan Ganguly from the
Paschim Banga Khet Majdoor Sabha (West Bengal Agricultural
Workers Federation), speaking next, felt that the
‘assault’ of the developed countries under the WTO was
nothing new but only colonialism in a new garb.
In the
post-lunch session the topic was ‘Should Indian Textile
Policy be Pro-Cotton?’ Both Bani Saraswati of the Sreema
Mahila Samity from Duttaphulia, Nadia and Alok Goswami,
President, Embroidery & Garments Hitech Manufacturing
Association, spoke of their experiences in uniting
discrete manufacturing units and expressed their concerns
in the face of globalisation.
CUTS has
initiated the GRANITE project in eight states of India
with the support of the Norwegian Agency for Development
Cooperation and Novib (Oxfam, The Netherlands). The
overall objective is to develop a network of NGOs working
at the grassroots levels, focussing on the fields of
agriculture and textiles, in order to increase their
capacities to comprehend complex issues of globalisation
and the WTO. This project, to be implemented over two
years, would also undertake activities to convey the WTO-related
concerns of these sectors to the policy-makers both at the
state and the national levels, so that these concerns are
paid heed to while formulating laws and policies. | 
