WTO Smackdown
January 2nd, 2007 by Vihar ShethPosted in Development, Environment, Globalization, Society, Trade
Only a week after I posted my paper, “The World Trade Organization and Sustainable Development“, on green | rising, a law student named Daniel Schramm has published an opinion piece in my local paper entitle, “Ecological and social issues get short shrift at the WTO“. The gist of the article is exactly as the title suggests. Schramm defends his point by explaining the WTO’s attention was beginning to be focused on the social and environmental costs of trade in the late 90s but everything changed after the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
Schramm begins his piece with these passages, highlighting the shift in focus at the WTO and the motivation for that shift.
“In 1999, the much-maligned anti-globalization movement brought the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference in Seattle to a grinding halt, using non-violent tactics to draw media attention to the many social and environmental costs of the WTO’s trade rules.
It worked; no less a proponent of free trade than then-President Bill Clinton acknowledged that those concerns — inhumane working conditions, fractured communities, despoiled ecosystems — were not being addressed adequately. These sorts of costs, not national security, moved to the center of the diplomatic community’s attention.
Two years later, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, and everything changed. The Bush administration launched an aggressive military counterattack, embraced unilateralism and put national security ahead of what appeared to be less immediate global issues such as the environment and sustainable economic policies.
This reaction, embraced at the time by the vast majority of Congress, could be characterized as myopic — given that terrorists tend to choose targets for their resonant symbolic value and that these particular terrorists attacked the World Trade Center.”
If we are to believe our government, the world is safer now that Iraq is in borderline civil war and Iran has been sternly warned about its nuclear program repeatedly. You know, Kim Jong-il has been suspiciously silent lately . . . Let’s assume for a moment the world is safer because of the “global” fight on terrorism. Shouldn’t it follow that the WTO’s focus would once again move to social and environmental costs of trade instead of those related to national security? Schramm says:
“Today, with America waging a war on terrorism, the concerns about the WTO raised by the demonstrators in Seattle have dropped off the radar of the public, the media and most policymakers. But the WTO continues to decide trade disputes among its members and, in the name of free trade, continues to enforce restrictive rules that inhibit the ability of sovereign states to ensure environmental protection and social cohesion.”
This is exactly the point I made in my paper. The WTO is too narrow-minded and cries about mission creep when asked to include more comprehensive regulations on “environmental protection and social cohesion”. I think it’s time for the WTO to exert some power and shape up. The infrastructure of developing nations will collapse if the resources are exhausted and poor go from have very few outlets to make a living to none. Schramm makes some other interesting points in his piece regarding genetically modified organisms and the WTO’s refusal to enforce treaties that weren’t ratified by every single one of its 149 members. Schramm says, “It [The WTO] ignored the Cartagena Protocol because the three countries complaining about its provisions — the United States, Canada and Argentina — had not ratified it.”
The WTO’s decisions are much more far-reaching that the WTO would like to believe. The organization maintains its focus is on trade and trade alone. It refuses to acknowledge the link between trade and social and environmental impact. Because of its ignorance, the WTO could become a forum for countries wishing to be excused from responsibility. As Schramm points out, “Attempts to deal with global warming through international treaties (i.e., the Kyoto Protocol) may be hindered if unhappy countries choose the WTO as the forum in which to challenge trade-restrictive climate regulations.”
The piece closes with this thought:
“Among the many failures of the American political establishment in its response to 9/11, future historians will note the lost opportunity to strike a less aggressive, more conciliatory posture on trade. The current drive to advance the interests of American big business through the WTO’s trade-tilted rules — regardless of the loss of goodwill among allies around the world — will be perceived as one more element of the incoherent and counterproductive war on terrorism.”
We’ve come full circle. Centuries of isolated policy and decision making must come to an end in the near future. The world is too connected for countries and international organizations to operate without thinking about the long-term effects of their decisions. Trade can not be viewed as trade alone - not when people use natural resources to make the things we trade, and most of the things we trade end up in the trash. The WTO propagates global commerce, and in the name of sustainable development and common sense, it needs to take responsibility for its actions.
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