He said he hopes that the social movements will be able to draw the attention of the ministers that are in Geneva. He said we should show this is a critical moment in the world -with the finance, food and climate crises – and that the solutions put forward by the World Trade Organization is not the solution, but the cause of many of the problems that we are experiencing.

Clarke told Real World Radio that the organizations present in the meeting, like the Korean farmers, the Filipino fisher folk, represent millions of other people who are affected by the decisions on trade made by the WTO.

He also described this Ministerial meeting as ’unusual’, since it is not a ’negotiating ministerial’ because the ministers will not be directly involved in many negotiations on agriculture, on services, or non agriculture market access.
They are trying to determine what the role of the WTO is in the context of the global
crisis.

Clarke says the ministers are trying to reposition the work of the WTO to make it more relevant to these crises, while the social movements are trying to say to them and to the rest of the world the solutions that they’ve come up with are wrong, “the model is broken and we have to come up with a new one” that is more democratic, transparent, sustainable and built on justice and equity.