Monday, February 8, 2010

The World Trade Organization

Source: Invisible Government
By Debbie Barker and Jerry Mander, International Forum on Globalization

Synopsis: Economic globalization hasn’t been scrutinized by any institutions without an interest in portraying the consequences as anything but positive. One of the goals of the WTO is a removal of legislation to benefit free trade, possibly at the cost of human rights, workers’ rights, environmental protection, etc. For a variety of reasons, the WTO has become a global governing body, allowing issues of trade to dominate all others. The source then goes on to look at the effects of the WTO on the environment, agriculture, food, public health, culture, intellectual property rights, finance and investment.

Reflection:

At the risk of over-sharing, I’d like to tell you a short story. Several years ago, I briefly dated a woman who met most of the benchmarks of my dream woman. I was falling for her, she did not feel the same, and it ended. At that time, I had a close relationship with God, and I prayed daily for Him (sorry women, God to me was a male) to ease my heartbreak. I’m an avid reader, and often escape into books, so I went to an author I love, Daniel Quinn, and picked up one of his books I hadn’t read, The Story of B. Daily, I read that book and it found every chink in my Christian fait, and nightly I prayed to a god that was becoming increasingly hard to believe in. Finally, one night, I tried to pray, but it no longer felt like anybody was listening.

Not since that life-altering moment have I felt so conflicted. I was raised by hardworking people who believe that hard work begets rewards, and that governments, while not necessarily evil, are huge, ponderous, inefficient entities whose regulation results in disastrous unintended consequences. My parents are Republicans in the traditional sense of the word. I’m reading Atlas Shrugged because my mother told me it was one of the most important books she’d ever read.

Now, I’m reading resources like this one, which present some pretty good arguments that, without some kind of regulation, free market capitalism is going to bring about the end of the world. And now, like some double agent in the room of smoke and mirrors, I find myself wondering what and whom to believe. I read about the potential environmental effects under the influence of the WTO, and I hear my father, whispering over my shoulder to find out who signed the paychecks of the authors. I read about the evil agribusiness giants patenting plants and animals, and I wonder what Ayn Rand would think. Without launching into a diatribe about epistemology and the evils of monetary influence on research, and in an effort to not just lay in the corner in the fetal position, sucking my thumb, I’m going to take it on faith that what we’re reading has been scrutinized, that those doing the scrutinizing were considering interests beyond the bottom line of their personal savings accounts, and that the scrutinizing was based on more than the ideals of some tree-hugging neohippies. Whew, glad to get that off my chest.

In any case, the WTO as depicted in this document is the quintessence of why Business As Usual is not sustainable. For decades, the purpose of our economy was to maximize profit at any cost, and it seems that’s the aim of the WTO. We’re now learning that dollars and cents cannot be the only bottom line considered, although it may be possible to quantify, albeit incompletely, the bottom lines of ecological integrity and social justice using dollars and cents. While only tangentially related to this resource, criticism of capitalism is part of sustainable business management, and as such, relevant. I'll come back to this frequently throughout the semester, I'm sure.

2 comments:

  1. Lost love. Shaken spirituality. Conservative parents. WTO. At the risk of reverse-over-sharing, I've travelled this road myself. And lived to talk about it. It turns out well.

    One thought I had on this article that I haven't completely resolved in my own mind. Maybe you can provide some thoughts. The WTO levels the playing field by opening markets and reducing barriers such as regulations. If we are forced to lower our environmental regulations in order to comply with being a freer market, will we no longer export our dirty industry to other countries that do not have those regulations? Opting instead to simply pollute here again? If so, the result would be a more just distribution of pollution (i.e. we will have to live in our own waste). This might lead us to clean up voluntarily rather than under the threat of regulation.

    It is sort of the "a rising tide lifts all boats" argument for the environment. We might say "a lowering of regulations cleans all environments." (Of course, the rising tide notion hasn't exactly panned out for us as some thought it would, now has it?)

    See what you did. You broke my brain.

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  2. More of my $.02: We don't really need to worry about pushing people toward sustainable behavior. By its very definition, if a behavior is not sustainable, it will cease to exist. This gets at one of my original questions. If all species go extinct, what are we hoping to accomplish? Clearly, it's a quality of life question. In the example you cite, in which we have to lie in the bed we made, we'd get the picture, and I like to think that would catalyze change, but at what cost to our quality of life? There are dozens of books and movies about human life post-apocalypse (The Road and The Parable of the Sower come to mind as being exceptional) and none of them are happy. So that's learning the lesson the hard way.

    Or, we can pay attention to what the really smart scientists are telling us and try to learn this lesson the easy way, taking action before our quality of life is in the gutter, literally and figuratively.

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