Martin Khor: A luta contina! Roberto Bissio

I first met Martin in November 1984 in Penang, during the conference in which some two hundred intellectuals and activists from around the world met and concluded that a Third World Network needed to be created to face the global neoliberal offensive led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and mandated the host organization, the Consumers Association of Penang (CAP) to set it up.

Martin was then a young economist, a Cambridge graduate who had decided to abandon a promising career at Singapore and to ignore the temptation of serving the multinationals corporations that were starting a second wave of export-oriented growth in South-East Asia, to devote himself instead to help organize civil society.

As the first association of its kind in the developing world, CAP was receiving complaints about defective video- recorders, but also paying attention to the voices of fishing communities displaced by ill-conceived development projects, campaigning against a shopping center that was destroying several blocks of the historic center of Georgetown, Penang island’s capital, and organizing crusades against tobacco and against sugar … decades before they became fashionable.

From accumulating evidence from each case, won or lost, Martin was detecting trends, the “root causes” as he would say, of social injustice or environmental destruction. Not having been able to stop the first skyscraper in Penang or the bridge linking the island with the mainland, did not dissuade him from targeting much bigger global enemies as head of TWN. Unfairness could not be tolerated.

Thus, in a moment when it was common sense for Western environmentalists to blame population growth in the South as the threat, Martin was a key contributor to re-framing the discussion of the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro as a crusade against unsustainable production and consumption patterns in the North.

Years later, in 1996, when the ink was still drying on the Marrakesh Agreements that created the World Trade Organization, the North was already pushing to make the WTO even more unfair for the South by adding new issues to its disciplines, such as investment agreements (to allow investors to sue host governments, but not the other way around) or competition rules biased against state-owned enterprises or procurement proceedings favouring multinational corporations. Martin picked up that fight and developed a strategy that combined popular mobilization of the affected sectors with the consolidation of a group of like-minded developing country diplomats that actually blocked those issues at the Singapore Ministerial meeting of the WTO.

A few weeks later in Geneva, as TWN representative in Latin America, I attended a small meeting when a leading Southern Ambassador thanked Martin for the efforts deployed in Singapore, but in a depressed mood announced that “everything we fought for since independence will be lost” because the OECD has now taken the issue of investor protection as its own, and once a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was agreed to in that rich countries club, without any opposition of the South, it would become the unavoidable global standard.

“We shall stop it then!” said Martin, making me look down to not show surprise or disbelief. But true to his commitment, Martin devoted most of his 16 to 18 hours work journeys in the next months to fight the MAI Goliath by attacking it from its rearguard. There, where Southern diplomacy had no access, TWN mobilized its network, friends and the wider public to address the key sectors that would be affected in the North itself by this new push of unrestricted globalization: environmentalists, women, health campaigners, educators, unions.

As the implications began to be understood, explained and translated into campaigns, parliamentarians in capitals started to ask uncomfortable questions: in Ottawa, Rome or Seoul; the Internet circulated leaked drafts, petitions and discussions and the resulting global mobilization led to the OECD dropping the issue in 1998.

Martin never claimed any personal credit for this or for his many other achievements in the global campaigns on trade, on climate change or on antibiotic resistance. Instead, he always paid tribute to his predecessors, team work, detailed research and documentation to support any claim and commitment to essential values and a simple life.

When I last met him, not so many weeks ago in Penang, fully aware of how cancer was limiting his energies, he was actively organizing the continuation of the work on many fronts and advising the generation that he trained and inspired to search for and motivate the youth. That is how “a luta continua”! (“the struggle continues”).

(Roberto Bissio is a Uruguayan journalist and Coordinator of the civil society organization Social Watch.)