For Immediate Release

Ottawa - Cultural producers and activists around the world, united in the International Network for Cultural Diversity (INCD), are calling on world leaders meeting at the World Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia (WCAR) to endorse the creation of an international instrument for cultural diversity.

"Cultural diversity within and among nations must be protected against mono-cultural hegemony, which historically has fanned racial, ethnic, gender, and socio-economic discrimination" says James Early, a director at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and a member of the steering committee of the INCD.

Early will bring the cultural instrument concept to the WCAR meetings along with fellow INCD steering committee member Japan Mthembu, a well-known television actor in South Africa.

"The cultural instrument is necessary to maintain the right of states to implement measures to support their own artists and producers, and to support sustainable development" says Mthembu, who is the General Secretary of Performing Arts Workers Equity (PAWE) of South Africa.

More than 300 cultural groups from over fifty countries belong to the INCD. At its founding conference last year on the island of Santorini, in Greece, the network endorsed the creation of a new instrument for cultural diversity. The instrument would remove culture from the dictates of trade agreements, which tend to favor the largest entertainment industry producers, and instead promote cultural diversity and exchange.

The INCD grew out of UNESCO's World Commission on Culture and Development, which identified a strong link between racism, xenophobia, and the flooding of nations with imported culture. Nations flooded with foreign messages are prey to "a convulsive ingathering, a return to past traditions and a reaction towards tribalism,"concluded the 1995 report of the Commission.

The INCD will hold its second conference, Towards a Global Pact for Culture, in Lucerne, Switzerland, from September 21 to 23. A famous Buddhist author from Thailand, a group of film industry developers from the Congo, and Canadian broadcaster and INCD founding member RH Thomson will be among the aproximately one hundred participants from thirty eight countries. The conference is being organized from the INCD Secretariat at the Canadian Conference of the Arts (CCA) in collaboration with Suisseculture.