The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

how multinational corporations control food 313the World Trade Organization, and before that by the final round of GATT,directly undermines the economic rights of the poorest.”Monsanto and the Multinational Corporations Behindthe WTO Agreement on Intellectual Property RightsThe General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was put in place in1947 by the major capitalist powers of the time with the purpose of regulatingcustoms duties on international trade. The 1986 ministerial conferenceof Punta del Este, inaugurating what became known as the “UruguayRound,” marked a decisive turning point in the history of GATT, in effectsigning its death warrant. It was in the course of the eighth and final sessionof these intergovernmental trade negotiations in 1994 that the Americangovernment won agreement for the inclusion of four areas that had untilthen been under exclusively national political jurisdiction: agriculture, investments,services (telecommunications, transportation, and the like), andintellectual property rights (IPR). The U.S. trade representative justified theinclusion of this last area, with which I am particularly concerned, by thefact that “nearly 200 American transnational companies were deprived of 24billion dollars of copyright earnings because of the weakness or absence ofprotection for intellectual property in some countries, primarily in the countriesof the South,” as a study by the University of Quebec reported. 6The inclusion of these new areas under GATT’s jurisdiction, which hadat first been a simple customs union, was the focus of intense negotiations,because they “raised questions that went beyond trade,” namely, “fundamentalrights” such as the “rights to employment, health, food, and selfdetermination,”as Shiva has pointed out. 7 In December 1989, ArthurDunkel, director-general of GATT, submitted a proposed final document,but it was not until April 1994 that the definitive agreement was signed bythe 123 member countries in Marrakesh, ratifying the creation of the WorldTrade Organization, which officially replaced GATT on January 1, 1995.The founding document of the WTO, which meets in Geneva, containstwenty-nine sectorial agreements making possible the subjection of anygood or service to the laws of the market, and therefore the transfer to privatecompanies (over which governments and citizens have no means of