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John Nichols: Wal-Mart aims to kill land use rules

By John Nichols
December 15, 2005

The World Trade Organization services agreement that is to be discussed at this week's WTO ministerial meeting in that Asian city poses a serious threat to the authority of state and local governments to make land use decisions that might limit the size, hours and working conditions at Wal-Mart and other big box stores.

Needless to say, Wal-Mart is all for changing the rules. The corporation spends tens of millions of dollars every year fighting to win approval for its new stores in communities across the country. And the costs are going up as local officials become aware that big box centers create unfair competition for locally owned shops; locate on the fringe of communities and thus undermine the vitality of downtowns; pay low wages; and import the vast majority of the products they sell from overseas.

Wal-Mart does not want to have to comply with local rules and regulations, and it certainly does not want to face the prospect that more and more communities will reject its plans altogether.

So the Arkansas-based corporation is lobbying hard for new provisions in the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services that are designed to limit and in some cases prevent communities from using local zoning rules and other land use and development policies to police Wal-Mart. As long ago as 2002, Wal-Mart began urging Bush administration trade negotiators to push for rules that would force member countries of the WTO to remove "any size limitations on individual stores" and "geographic limitations on store locations."

"Major big box retail corporations have been eyeing the GATS as a way of gutting local zoning and land use laws that have kept them out of communities in Europe and the United States," explains Saerom Park, the General Agreement on Trade in Services outreach coordinator for Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division. "They are pursuing a strategy of global pre-emption. Citizens concerned about setting sane land use policies need to know that Wal-Mart is just one of the firms that has been lobbying both the U.S. government and the WTO on this issue."

Citizens need to lobby the U.S. government because, as of now, the Bush administration and its trade negotiators are doing Wal-Mart's bidding.

"(Unlike) many European and Asian nations, U.S. trade negotiators failed to safeguard local land use laws from the existing WTO services agreement, much in the same way that they failed to protect state gambling laws from the GATS," says Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Trade Watch division. Wallach was referring to a recent WTO ruling that limited the ability of states to regulate gambling.

If Wal-Mart keeps getting its way, Wallach argues, there is a very good chance that "rather than paring back our commitments under the GATS to protect state sovereignty and the right to regulate as a local governing entity, the Bush administration is hoping for an agreement in Hong Kong that would deliver a vast expansion of the GATS, including into areas largely regulated by states."

If that happens, communities such as Monona and Stoughton, and others like them across the United States, will not merely lose the ability to say "no" to Wal-Mart. They could lose the ability to negotiate basic standards, including size and height restrictions, limits on hours of operation, environmental protections and rules preserving cultural and historic sites. They could, as well, lose the right to develop economic needs tests that retail corporations must meet before winning approval for new stores thus eliminating a tool that Los Angeles and other cities have used to regulate the expansion of Wal-Mart and other big box chains into vulnerable neighborhoods.

Wal-Mart tends to roll over most opposition, as local business owners and community activists in Monona and Stoughton have learned. But at least it is still possible to set some basic rules for the big boxes. If the Bush administration lets the WTO knock out the ability of state and municipal governments to set those rules, it won't just be Main Street that communities across the country will see disappear. It will be local democracy.