Guide to where the mines are buried

Most of these strictures are not intrinsic to international trade. Rather, they have resulted from the veiled efforts of the most powerful nations and corporations, who use WTO rules and rulings as crowbars to wrench open markets and batter down laws defending the quality of human life and the environment.

The record of the past six years is clear: nearly all WTO decisions have gutted democratic restrictions on trade, effectively lowering environmental, consumer protection, public health, and human rights standards. Even when reasonable standards were applied equally to all domestic and foreign producers, the WTO has repeatedly struck them down as trade barriers, demolishing shelters that citizens have built against the stormy side effects of market forces.

When is trade “free”?

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  National treatment - Goods imported from countries that have signed the treaty must be treated the same as domestic ones.
  
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  Most-favored nation treatment - Goods imported from each signatory country must be treated equally.
  

And the WTO’s version of “free trade” has distinct limits. Countries and corporations of means can manipulate negotiations and dispute settlements to their advantage. When it comes to intellectual property, for example, the WTO’s TRIPS Agreement enforces restrictions on trade—copyrights and patents—in the name of encouraging innovation. This benefits almost exclusively wealthy nations and transnational enterprises, while harming small farmers and indigent AIDS victims. Yet the WTO outlaws other exceptions to free trade that might benefit poor people and countries.

For many sectors in many countries, lowering barriers to international trade may be a viable policy. But no developed country has industrialized without protection and government support of critical industries. And many developing countries who have thrown their economies open to international markets have sunk deeper into poverty and debt.

Developing and industrialized countries alike should be able to weigh the pros and cons of trade liberalization for their particular economy against other social values and goals. The WTO is harmful not because it promotes free trade, but because it forecloses with closed tribunals and draconian penalties the possibility of any economic strategy other than corporate-managed trade. It attempts to impose an anti-democratic monoculture on an exuberantly heterogeneous world.

Opinions

— Renato Ruggiero, former WTO Director-General

“The WTO is basically the first constitution based on the rules of trade and the rules of commerce. Every other constitution has been based on the sovereignty of people and countries. Every constitution has protected life above profits. But WTO protects profits above the right to life of humans and other species.”

— Vandana Shiva, author and environmentalist, India

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“There are some who believe that simply opening markets on a global scale is the be-all and end-all, no matter how it is done or no matter who benefits. I subscribe to a different view. It is imperative that we open markets in a manner consistent with the rules of the WTO, but we must make sure Americans benefit directly from the process, and to do that Americans must drive the rules of the new global landscape and the opening of markets.”

“From the free-market paradigm that underpins it, to the rules and regulations set forth in the different agreements that make up the Uruguay Round, to its system of decision-making and accountability, the WTO is a blueprint for the global hegemony of Corporate America.”

— Walden Bello, Director, Focus on the Global South, Bangkok, Thailand

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“In broad terms, the WTO is designed to entrench ‘grow-now, pay-later’ globalization by removing the power of governments to regulate corporate activity in the public interest. The result is that it will undermine our capacity to redirect current economic, development and trade policies towards a truly sustainable path.”