Whenever the World Trade Organization meets, the news isn’t so much about the various trade laws debated by the international organization as it is about the protests outside. While the decisions reached at these meetings are important, they’re usually hidden in a labyrinth of technical language and trade jargon that’s impenetrable to most people. Enter Arnie Alpert, executive director of the New Hampshire office of the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers). Alpert has been keeping track of the WTO for six years. He’s also observed the accompanying protests and the riots that plagued the WTO’s meeting in Seattle in 1999 and a 2003 meeting in Cancun. Most recently, he traveled to Hong Kong for the WTO’s latest meeting, Dec. 13-18. Alpert will discuss the meeting at a presentation on Tuesday, Jan. 4 at 7 p.m. at the South Church (292 State St., Portsmouth).

This is the third WTO meeting you’ve observed. Why do you go?
Back in the 1990s, (WTO director-general Renato Ruggiero) said in (a) speech “We are writing the constitution for a single global economy,” and in effect, that is what the WTO is—overlapping rules governing global commerce. The more that our economy is global, the rules that are governing it are going to affect the lives of people all over world. But the proceedings … are not very easily accessible for most people, and the rules themselves are very technical. … What I’ve been doing for a number of years, without becoming a trade lawyer, is trying to understand enough of this process to get an idea of what is the likely impact of these new rules on not only us in New Hampshire, but also what we can do to influence this process.

What were some of the major topics discussed at the Hong Kong meeting?
One of the big topics that is on the WTO agenda now is “trade in services.” It has to do with the rules that govern the service sectors of the economy, which is huge, and not what people think about when they think about trade.

We used to think about Toyotas manufactured in Japan and imported to the U.S. … but when you start thinking about the service sectors in the economy, which includes health care, education, water and electrical utilities, travel and tourism, law and business, architecture, construction and engineering, (that’s) most of the economy now.

Let’s take water for example. … Given the fact that the largest water utility companies in the world are transnational (companies) mostly based in Europe—whether it’s USA Springs, which wants to bottle water in Nottingham and sell it in Europe … or the Nestle Corporation, which owns Poland Springs— that becomes an issue that is potentially affected by international trade rules. Those rules have the ability, once they’re created, in effect to trump our local regulations, our state laws and our federal laws.

What were the observances outside the meeting like?
It was mostly peaceful. There were some confrontations between protestors and Hong Kong police, especially on Saturday (Dec. 17), where Korean farmers, who are in danger of losing their livelihood due to these so-called free trade agreements, have a rather confrontational protest style. They got into clashes with police, and police were using pepper spray and tear gas and fire hoses, and I believe the water in the hoses was also laced with pepper. And later on in the middle of the night, they also arrested some 900 people. So that was a rather intense moment. But the following day, there was a huge march with 10,000 people that was thoroughly peaceful and festive. I was marching with young women from Indonesia who were working as domestic workers in Hong Kong.

What is the connection between trade policy and militarism?
For lot of people around world, they see trade policies enacted through the WTO as an extension of the type of policies that the U.S. and some European countries also pursue through military means. So there’s a sense of global domination by wealthy countries, for many people, that’s part of the same system of realities they’re confronting and trying to resist.

Look at some policies that the U.S. has been forcing on Iraq as a consequence of the U.S. conquest and occupation. (They) very much followed the same type of policies which are referred to as free trade or liberalization … basically making it easier for multi-national companies based in the U.S. and Europe to become the major economic players in those countries.

Why don’t these meetings get more attention from the press?
Most of this gets consigned to the business pages of the paper. There’s no farmer page of our newspapers, there’s no labor page of our newspapers, so the U.S. media doesn’t in general pay much attention to the issues affecting most of the people in the world. What does get covered is … the international relations aspect of it … and protests by and large only get covered if there’s violence and confrontation … and then only violence and confrontation gets covered and not what the people were actually protesting about.

You’ve been following the WTO for a while. How has corporate globalization changed the world since 1999?
The organizations that monitor these things have gotten much more … competent in deciphering trade speak and trade law, which is one of reasons why the meetings have not gone the way negotiators want them to go. The non-governmental organizations, working with government negotiators for developing countries, have gotten savvy about what this process is all about and are digging their heels in more. There’s a high level of international coordination among these groups now.

When laws are made at the State House in Concord, you can go to hearings, sit in the gallery and observe the debates. … And even at the U.S. Congress, it’s possible to listen in on what’s getting talked about. But at the WTO … you’re not allowed in the room and I’m not allowed in the room, so it’s much more like negotiations between businesses taking place in a private context rather than people who are public officials negotiating, supposedly on behalf of the people they represent, in a democratic way. That has not changed.