EDITORIAL World Trade Organization bad for our
world
President Clinton immediately hailed
as a good agreement for China, for America and for the world the
Nov. 15 accord that opens the way for China to join the World Trade
Organization, commonly known as the WTO.
It is a judgment far from universally shared. Workers, both in the
United States and in China, will suffer from the unrestrained competition that
is the primary objective of the WTO, because the organization has no rules for
their benefit. Workers on both sides of our long border with Mexico already
know who benefits from and who is hurt by the WTO rules. The expansion of trade
following the North American Free Trade Agreement, which incorporates the WTO
principle of unrestricted movement of goods, has significantly lowered their
real wages.
The World Trade Organization has been in existence for only five
years, but the harm it has already done is so outrageous as to bring the
representatives of a thousand non-governmental organizations -- called NGOs --
to Seattle last week to protest at its third ministerial meeting.
It has taken only five years for the WTO and its promotion of
globalization to upend the role of nation states. So much of what once was the
states role and responsibility in major decisions affecting health and
welfare has been turned over to the chief players in the global
marketplace.
So the protesters came to Seattle with a list of charges that in
the past would have been laid at the doorstep of national governments.
The protesters charged that the WTOs three-judge courts --
whose proceedings are kept secret -- have found for the plaintiffs in every
case brought before them that challenges environmental or public safety
legislation. The giant sea turtles lost their protection under the Endangered
Species Act when foreign commercial shrimpers protested. Venezuelan oil
companies succeeded in quashing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys
air quality standards for imported gasoline. The European Unions ban on
hormone-treated beef was overturned by U.S. cattlemen.
Many countries fear that the WTO will be used to destroy their
cultures. Last year some 20 nations, including Brazil, Italy, Ivory Coast,
Mexico and Sweden, met in Ottawa to discuss ways to protect their film
production industries and other expressions of their culture from the
Hollywood juggernaut. Shortly afterward, a similar gathering in Stockholm
under U.N. auspices recommended that culture be granted special exemptions in
global trade deals.
While claiming to be all for free trade, the WTO is in fact
protectionist. It has no time for free markets in intellectual property rights,
the patents, copyrights and monopolies that benefit principally major
corporations. Pharmaceutical corporations, for example, use patents protected
by the WTO to charge consumers in the United States twice what the same drugs
cost the consumer in countries in which the government fixes the fair price of
the same drugs.
The pharmaceutical companies defend the higher prices here as
necessary to finance continuing research and development. An arrangement
brokered just weeks ago by the World Health Organization -- called WHO -- to
develop antidotes for malaria exposes the fallacy of this argument. Malaria
each year strikes 300 million to 500 million people. A million die, and the
others lose much of their ability to earn their living. The situation gets
worse each year because strains of malaria grow more resistant to established
treatments.
A vast need, however, does not automatically make a market. Most
victims of malaria live in Africa. Most of them are wretchedly poor. No drug
company is interested in investing $500 million, the estimated average cost of
developing and registering a pharmaceutical product, when the people who need
the drug cannot afford to pay for it. In this situation, WHO has created the
Medicines for Malaria Venture with funding from the World Bank, the Rockefeller
Foundation, the Global Forum for Health Research, Swiss and British government
agencies, and the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers
Associations. It plans to develop and register a new antimalaria drug every
five years.
The WHO intervention provides a more rational formula for the
unending research and development needed to ensure the new drugs needed to
protect the health of the worlds peoples. It is a formula based on need,
not greed. Public funding of all drug research and development would give us
the drugs we need at less cost.
The dominant issue for the NGOs at Seattle, however, is whether
the meeting will provide trade sanctions against countries that violate
internationally agreed standards, like the ban on forced labor and child labor.
AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney has criticized the agreement with China for
failing to include commitments to allow free trade unions and to free
imprisoned labor leaders. He insists that the Seattle meeting must provide
worldwide guarantees for organizing trade unions and engaging in collective
bargaining.
The Clinton administration has made some noises indicating
sympathy with the demands of labor. But the focus of its concern for the
Seattle meeting seems to be elsewhere, namely, a Global Free Logging Agreement.
This, if approved, will lead to unsustainable logging worldwide and adversely
affect the protection of the limited forest cover that we still have here in
the United States. Nobody knows what will be the effect on the planets
climate. What is certain is that it will not improve it.
National Catholic Reporter, December 10,
1999
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