Sunny days and street theatre...

Thursday 11 May, late afternoon

It has been a beautiful day in Vienna. Perfect for hanging out in parks. Which is what I have been doing. Well, this morning anyway.

After an early breakfast meeting with the team in which we discussed yesterday’s events and went through the day’s schedule, we all headed down to the park near the alternative summit where we staged a photo stunt for the press along with two other civil-society organisations, the Transnational Institute (TNI) and the Hemispheric Social Alliance. (Pictures available here and here)

It was classic street theatre. We had a map of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) made up of six cardboard cubes, each about 1.5 metres square in size. We built the “continent” under the trees and then, when the journalists arrived, six people in blue masks bearing the yellow stars of the European Union flag approached the map rubbing their hands together and pointing out the bits of the continent they wanted. Then, one by one, each of the “EU leaders” took a piece of the map away until it was all broken up.

Then, three civil-society members came onto the scene and wrestled the cubes back from the EU leaders and reconstructed the map: reclaiming Latin America and the Caribbean for the people.

The idea was to suggest that the free-trade agreements that the EU wants to sign with LAC threaten to be a form of appropriation that will not boost development or integration but will divide the continent into segmented “markets”. The banners held on either side of the map said, in Spanish and English: “Integration for development, not free trade agreements”.

After the event a spokesperson from each organisation gave a short speech. Oxfam’s campaigns coordinator in Latin America and the Caribbean, Simon Ticehurst said that although trade can be a tool to promote development, unfettered free-trade agreements between developed and developing countries do not do this. On the contrary, without measures to take into account the differences between countries, trade liberalisation can exacerbate inequality and undermine efforts to reduce poverty. He said that if the EU was serious about promoting development in Latin America and the Caribbean it should stop pushing free-trade agreements and get back to the table at the WTO where it needs to make better offers to unlock the round.

The spokesperson for the Hemispheric Social Alliance, Enrique Daza, spoke in Spanish about peoples’ rights to access water, education, work, food, and health, and the tendency of free-trade agreements to undermine these rights because of their agenda of deregulation, privatisation and liberalisation. He called on the official declarations of the EU-LAC summit to uphold human rights and democratic values.

Fiona Dove, the director of the Transnational Institute, spoke of the need for European and Latin American social movements to be involved in development of an alternative to the “Washington Consensus”. She said that although the EU talks a lot about development co-operation and political dialogue, beneath the rhetoric it is aggressively pushing a free-trade agenda. TNI and its supporters want genuine, people-centred development, environmental sustainability and accessible public services for all.

It was a significant moment for Oxfam and the other allies to be working together at an event like this. It showed that although we may have some different policy positions and be speaking from different perspectives, we share similar concerns about the way in which many people are excluded from the benefits of economic growth and globalisation.

Tomorrow I’m planning to spend most of the day at the official summit. It seems lots of prime ministers and presidents are planning to come, including Tony Blair, Nestor Kirchner, José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, Bertie Ahern, and of course Hugo Chàvez, Lula and Evo Morales. It remains to be seen whether any progress will be made on free trade areas or whether other issues like oil and energy will dominate the agenda. I just hope there's a park nearby for my daily dose of Austrian sunshine!