General Agreement on Trade in Services
“Take agriculture out of WTO” has been a cry heard with “increasing frequency since the 1999 Seattle protests,” including those at the 2000 Doha Round and 2003 Cancun meetings. Global communities such as La Via Campesina (Peasant Road) and over fifty other organizations banded together to claim: “the WTO is undemocratic and unaccountable, has increased global inequality and insecurity, promotes unsustainable production and consumption patterns, erodes diversity, and undermines social and environmental priorities.” Thus, they demanded the removal of not simply the AoA, but also any other relevant accord, including the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS), Quantitative Restrictions (QRs), and Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM). Food sovereignty highlights that food is a fundamental human right and condemns the WTO's treatment of agricultural purely as a commodity, rather than “as a means of livelihood and nourishment for peasants and small farmers.”