(AMARC/IFEX) – The following is an AMARC press release: Up for grabs: FTAA hits on communications Imagine turning on your radio and what you hear is commercial chatter announcing the next bar of soap being offered for sale on your new local TOP-40 station owned by a faceless media conglomerate somewhere in the US, but […]
(AMARC/IFEX) – The following is an AMARC press release:
Up for grabs: FTAA hits on communications
Imagine turning on your radio and what you hear is commercial chatter announcing the next bar of soap being offered for sale on your new local TOP-40 station owned by a faceless media conglomerate somewhere in the US, but whose subsidiary is in your backyard, broadcasting on the dial of what used to be your favourite community radio station. Ughh! This dramatic description may not be as exaggerated as you think.
Asked last week by Wendy Lill – New Democratic Party Culture Critic and Member of Parliament for Dartmouth, Nova Scotia – where culture ends and commerce begins, FTAA Chief Negotiator Claude Carrière said “I have to beg incompetence on that.”
This paints a concerning picture of the mindset under which cultural services, including the communications sector, are being negotiated during the FTAA talks.
The FTAA is said to be the most far-reaching trade agreement in history. According to Canada’s Maude Barlow, it would introduce into the Western Hemisphere “all the disciplines of the proposed services agreement of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), with the powers of the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), to create a new trade powerhouse with sweeping new authorities over every aspect of life in Canada, the Americas, and the Caribbean.”
In a market economy, books, plays, television shows, and radio programmes are considered “goods” or “services” to be traded domestically and internationally. But these cultural goods and services cannot be seen in economic terms alone, as they are much more than simply tradeable commodities. At least this is true of the community media sector, whose role it is to give expression to a diversity of voices for the social and cultural benefit of communities. This has also been true of the public broadcasting sector, whose role has been to represent the nation to itself and not sell soap to its citizens. But when FTAA negotiators cannot articulate the difference between culture and commerce, there is much reason to be concerned.
The increasing pace of the globalization of firms and markets, characterized by the creation of huge conglomerates like AOL-Time-Warner and the expansion of the American star system, for example, has had a dramatic impact on national cultures. Two concrete examples: the average sales figures of Canadian-owned record production companies are $3 million/year, compared to US$6 billion for the five major music multinationals with whom they compete. In the film industry, the average budget of films produced by Hollywood is $53 million, compared to $4 million for Canadian feature films. Canada just can’t compete.
Media concentration in Latin America doesn’t look any prettier. The four top Latin American media conglomerates and there holdings are: Cisneros Group (Venezuela) $3.2 billion; Globo (Brazil) $2.2 billion; Clarin (Argentina) $1.2 billion; Televisa (Mexico) $1.2 billion. They are considered to be second-tier media giants, not quite as big as the mostly U.S.-based transnational media corporations, which fill regional or niche markets but lack world-wide reach, so far.
As advocated by the Canadian Conference of the Arts, cultural policy plays the role of supporting the creation, production and dissemination of a broad range of cultural expression that can’t be assured by the market alone, and of “counterbalancing the growing disequilibrium in markets and production infrastructures brought on by globalization.”
The United States believes that key cultural policies of many countries are discriminatory and restrict access for their goods and services to these markets. For example, the US says television and radio quotas have been said to directly or indirectly limit its export of films, television programs and sound recordings.
These are the stakes. If the cultural industry, which includes the communications sector, is left as-is on the negotiating table of the FTAA, all countries in the Americas face the potential dismantling of regional cultures as they exist today. There is an alternative. A number of civil society actors are working towards the construction of a Hemispheric Social Alliance, which will meet for the second Peoples Summit of the Americas, on April 16-21.
This event occurs just before the official Summit of the Americas, where the heads of state from all countries (except Cuba) will gather to pursue the closed-door negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
The Peoples Summit is an international event that will be attended by representatives of major social and labour organizations from the 35 countries of the Americas, including Cuba. The purpose is to work towards alternative integration proposals in many different fields, including human rights, labour rights, the environment, women’s rights, communications, etc.
The World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) is part of the alliance, through its membership with a Montreal-based international cooperation organization (AQOCI). AMARC is organizing a Forum on Communications during the Peoples Summit. This will be the first time that the issue of communications will be discussed as a critical sector implicated in such an agreement.
More specifically, in the context of the media and democracy movement, the Forum on Communications will discuss the impact of the proposed FTAA on community and alternative media, elaborate strategies to protect the Right to Communicate, and work to develop a chapter for the advocacy report “Alternatives for the Americas”.
Latin American and North American alternative media, community media associations and outlets, and key people in the communications sector will be invited to participate. Through networking and building coalitions with alternative media organizations, a plan for advocacy and action will be the outcome of this two-day forum.
And that’s not all. As a demonstration of community media networking, a Mobile Internet Radio Broadcast is also being planned as a co-production between AMARC, the Réseau Québécois sur l’intégration continentale (RQIC), the Quebec Centre for Media Alternatives (CMAQ), Radio Bass-Ville in Quebec City, and various other indy media partners.
The organization of this event is led by the International Office of AMARC, the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, in collaboration with Development and Peace (Montreal) and Alter Vida/FM Trinidad (Paraguay).
For more information, contact Elvira Truglia at elvira.truglia@amarc.org
Sources:
– Maude Barlow. “The Free Trade Area of the Americas : The threat to social programs, environmental sustainability and social justice” A special report by The International Forum on Globalization.
– Janet Creery. Canadian Conference of the Arts
– Pierre Curzi and Jack Stoddart of the Coalition for Cultural Diversity. “Cultural policy must not be subject to the constraints of international trade agreements”
– Robert McChesney. “The global media giants: The nine firms that dominate the world”