[Editorial Advisory]
Find out what’s really going on at APEC . . .

Professor Jane Kelsey will be reporting on this year’s Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum on behalf of the New Internationalist magazine. The Ministers, Leaders and CEOs meetings will be held in Los Cabos, Mexico from 22 to 27 October. New Zealand hosted similar meetings in 1999.

Kelsey will also be the keynote speaker, along with politicians, activists and unionists at a Civil Society Forum in San Jose de Los Cabos on 23 October. The forum is organized by Mexican groups who are active opponents of NAFTA, APEC, the WTO and the proposed Free Trade Agreement for the Americas, and part of the international coalition Our World is Not for Sale. The forum will focus on the links between APEC and the WTO, as Mexico is the site of the next WTO ministerial meeting Cancun in September 2003.

Professor Kelsey is one of New Zealand’s leading critics of globalisation and a specialist on the political, social and international dimensions of APEC. She has been an accredited media representative at almost every APEC ministerial and leaders meeting since 1994 in Jakarta.

She has strong links with critics of APEC and the WTO internationally. She has been a frequent speaker at the NGO forums that run parallel to APEC meetings and challenge its agenda and effects on people across the region.

During the APEC meetings Jane will be monitoring:
- how APEC is feeding the WTO process, where the tensions are and what role the New Zealand government is playing
- popular resistance within Mexico and the Americas to NAFTA, the proposed FTAA and the forthcoming WTO ministerial meeting
- what a free trade agreement with the US would really mean for New Zealand, drawing on the NAFTA experience and the social and political impacts in Mexico
- developments with the Australian/US bilateral negotiations and where New Zealand does (or does not) fit
- the US strategy on bilaterals and WTO negotiations and this relates to its political, economic and military interests
- the corporate players driving the globalisation process and their demands at the CEO Summit and the APEC Business Advisory Council meeting

ENDS

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