Exploring how European Union (EU) trade policy relates to other macro-economic policies, this event offered feminist reflections on the global resistance against new trade agreements and their encroachment on domestic policies. EU trade policy uses gender as a reference point, but in fact remains blind to the real impacts of gender inequality and is embedded in a neocolonial economic approach. The event unpacked key issues from a feminist perspective:

  • How do free trade agreements of the EU (and US) with Latin America and Mexico impact women in general, and specifically in international production chains? How do networks involving diverse organizations from both Europe and Latin America, many led by women activists, resist.
  • A critical assessment of the EU-Chile Trade Agreement (AFA) and its links with increased extractivism on the ground, as well as the links with the gender equality narrative and actual impact on persisting gender and intersectional inequalities on the ground. And a review of resistance strategies and proposals from indigenous, rural, and feminist organisations, examining their relevance for transformative trade policies.
  • Assessing the impact of trade policy on women in employment and women entrepreneurs in Western Balkans. It will outline responses of women on these policies and how the EU’s own gender sensitive trade policy is not implemented.
  • How trade is impacting gender inequalities in the digital economy and what could be done to address gendered intersectional discrimination in algorithms, in particular reflecting on the FINDHR (Fairness and Intersectional Non-Discrimination in Human Recommendation) results.
  • Trade in health care work. Due to a shortage of "skilled labour” in OECD countries, states intensified the recruitment of health care professionals in the Global South through bilateral agreements and contracts which drive the migration of care workers in Global Care Chains. It will review lived experiences and how WHO and ILO attempt to regulate these global value chains in the sphere of social reproduction, the commodification of care work and the indebtedness of the workers caused by placement agencies – without much success.

Panelists seated on stage at an event on trade policies in the context of macro-economic policy making.

Organized by the European Gender and Trade working group of WIDE+, a GTC member, which monitors EU trade policies from a feminist perspective, develops public positions, and analyses alternatives, this event featured the following speakers:

  1. Christa Wichterich,
  2. Edmé Dominguez,
  3. Gea Meijers,
  4. Mirela Arqimandriti, and Patricia Munoz Cabrera.

Convenors

Wide