Conference with Yash Tandon: Trade is War – The West’s War against the world

Globalization has reduced many aspects of modern life to little more than commodities controlled by multinational corporations. Everything, from land and water to health and human rights, is today intimately linked to the issue of free trade.

Yash Tandon, drawing on decades of on-the-ground experience as a high level negotiator in bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), here challenges this prevailing orthodoxy. He insists that, for the vast majority of people, and especially those in the poorer regions of the world, free trade not only hinders development – it visits relentless waves of violence and impoverishment on their lives.

At this public conference, Yash Tandon shows how trade policies of the West are camouflaged in a rhetoric that hides their primary function as the servants of global business. Their actions are inflaming a crisis that extends beyond the realm of the economic, creating hot wars for markets and resources, fought between proxies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and now even in Europe.

Tandon suggests an alternative vision to this devastation, one based on self-sustaining, non-violent communities engaging in trade based on the real value of goods and services and the introduction of alternative currencies.

Yash Tandon (born 1939) is a Ugandan policymaker, political activist, professor, author and public intellectual. He completed his PhD in International relations at the London School of Economics in 1969. In the 1970s Tandon engaged in underground political work with broad democratic force for change of the Idi Amin regime in Uganda.

Spanning the 1990s and 2000s, Tandon was a founder member and the first director of the International South Group Network (ISGN) and the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI). He also served as the executive director of the South Centre for five years until his retirement in 2009.

Today, Yash Tandon is the author of numerous books and Honorary Professor at Warwick and London Middlesex Universities in the UK. His recently released his newest publication “Trade is war”.

Conference in English.

Organized by Action Solidarité Tiers Monde (www.astm.lu)