Public Services Conference / Seattle to Brussels Network Conference - Feb 11-16 2005, Budapest

Early next year ’Protect the Future’ (Hungary) is organising two international conferences in which we would like to ensure there is a significant participation from organisations from Central and Eastern Europe concerned about;

 the privitisation of Public Services, GATS and/or the EU’s ’Bolkenstein Directive’,
 agricultural ’reform’ in the guise of inequitable and unsustainable EU and global agricultural trade agreements
 GMOs
 sweatshop production
 international trade injustices perpetrated through the WTO
 Fair Trade and other consumer issues such as eco-labelling, access to information, product boycotts, etc.

The two events are as follows:

Feb. 11-13: Public Services, Globalisation and Sustainability Conference: presently, across the CEE region, Public Services are being liberalised and privitised, without any public dialogue on the environmental and social consequences of following the neo-liberal ideology for essential public services - water, education, public transport, health care and postal services are all being placed on the market. The conference aims to bring together a wide range of organisations and researchers from east and west to share experiences of uncontrolled commodification of essential services and build a CEE wide network for further cooperation to work towards ecologically and socially sustainable public services.

Feb. 13-16: Seattle To Brussels Network Conference - Due to resilient opposition from farmers, women’s, workers’, peasant and environmental organisations, the WTO Cancun Summit ended without agreement on how the ’Doha Round’ of trade negotiations should progress. Since then organisations across Europe have been looking towards the next ministerial summit in Hong Kong, december 2005: How can we continue to oppose the EU’s corporate-led trade agenda? What is our strategy for Hong Kong? What do the EU and WTO directives and agreements mean for agricultural sustainability, trade equity and the future of public services? Protect the Future would like to facilitate a stronger cooperation on trade justice issues in the region, and to this end joined the Seattle to Brussels Network: by hosting this meeting of the S2B Network we hope to extend the network to the CEE region and allow organisations to share experience and strengthen each others campaigns. (for more on S2B see www.s2bnetwork.org / For background reading see www.s2bnetwork.org/statements_publications.htm)

The two conferences complement each other very well and we would urge potential participants to consider taking part in both. The first will give a thorough insight into the questions of commodification and public control of public services, primarily within the region and at EU level. The second will place these questions within a wider context of global trade agreements and their interlinkages as global power blocks play one ’deal’ off against the other, to the benefit of elites and corporations. Both will encourage involvement in international campaigns to strengthen and achieve public participation, accountability, sustainability and social justice.

Both conferences will use English as their working language.

For more information about the Seattle to Brussels Network Conference, including the network coordinator’s letter of introduction to S2B, the registration form and the S2B program, see the full announcement.

The registration deadline is January 15th, 2005.