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Long live Globalization, WTO, and the World bank.

I am a firm believer in these policies and organizations. I believe that our world can only be more divided and worse without them.

Whether they are sufficient or not is not to question their existence.
These organizations along with the UN and the Red Cross are here to balance this world.

I become very angry when I see Anarchist and other various groups protesting outside trade meetings. It's sad that the WTO can't make every individual happy, but they are helping so many already. You don't see the happy farmers because they don't protest about their successful harvests and sales. You only see those who haven't been cared for yet.

You only see groups of induhviduals who think the world is better is we do't have structure, control and governments. That some how if we left everyone to themselves, all woes will be resolved.

Well weren't we like that 2 million years ago? Evolution and the test of time has led us to this national system.

My 2 pennies

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If it were me posting this people would probably see the underlying sarcasm. I think you should add a few smileys to show that you're not serious.

Happy farmers!
Globalisation a national system! ;)

That's priceless - thanks.

The WTO is a fine idea -- but is insufficient alone. The WTO does not address externalities created by free trade amongst nations with different regulatory systems. For instance, the USA has stricter environmental standards and labor standards that India or Mexico. If there is free trade between the USA and these countries, the companies living in the US are disadvantaged. Because the companies in the USA must meet higher environmental and labor requirements, they have a greater overhead and a smaller profit margin. This makes it tough to compete with the India/Mexico companies living under less strict regulations.

So, the US companies, rather than lose out to competition, try to find a way to cut labor/environment costs to compete. OSHA and EPA are serious enough that risking noncompliance is not an option -- the costs can be too great (with fines for violations topping out at $25,000/day or more). So, the solution is to pick up and move the business to another country where it can operate under less strict standards. IBM announces 3 weeks ago it is outsourcing tech support to India (and it's happening all over -- 3 tech support guys at Sony last week that I spoke with were definately Indian, whether they were in India I do not know). Ford moves plants to Mexico. Guess where VW Beatles are made -- Hecho en Mexico.

Worse -- in every instance this is a "race to the bottom" by all the companies striving to avoid regulation, operate dirty, and use cheap labor in order to compete with other companies doing the same.

So, until there are international bodies to address these externalities, or until the WTO will address these (the WTO standard bullshit line is "our mandate is only to regulate trade"), the WTO only creates problems. The WTO is nothing without a WLO and WEO, but is wonderful with them. ;) Now, when can we make this happen? :(

And this is why the last WTO talks failed - Western nations wanted to address these very problems - but the undeveloped nations weren't listening because they wanted the agricultural issues sorted out first.

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In my opinion THAT is not an issue!

US Farmers stand at highier advantage BECAUSE of highier regulations.

People with enough money will buy the foods with better reglated approval.

It should be fair that these products should jointly trade:

US Apple at $4 which is very safe
Indian Apple at $1 which is known to be alright.


Which would you buy?

And more importantly, once someone gets ill from the Indian Apple...

WHICH WOULD YOU BUY??

When we play the speculation game of chess, it's better to think a few moves ahead.
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If the Indian were smart enough to slap an "organic" label on his apple, he'd sell them like hotcakes to NYC yuppies and to anyone in CA, the entire west coast or most of the east coast. ;) He would have less overhead and would be selling his apple for double!

In fact, this was the very exact advice we were giving nine developing nations that attended a joint FIELD/UNCTAD* roundtable in Geneva when I was interning there. ;) I remember the delegate from Tunasia saying that EVERYTHING grown there was organic, simply due to the lack of money for fertilizer and pesticides.

Now, these farms and factories in other countries are largely OWNED by US companies (e.g., almost all of Cincinnati-based Chiquita Bananas' farms are in Nicaragua), but that doesn't help the problem. The jobs and benefits of the employed labor force leave this country, and the factories move and pollute more over there. The fact that a handful of corporate fat cats in the US are getting paid $1mil+/yr. to manage this whole ordeal does not help the US population nor economy very much. All it does is serve to widen the gap between the wealthy and the poor in the US.

To extend the example past the apple and use a few real-world examples:
1. On manufactured goods: the VW bug made in Mexico is made under less strict enviro standards yet no one asks "how much soil did you pollute or laborers were injured/underpaid when making this car" when they buy a car.
2. The EU/US banana fight is all about the EU wanting to protect (through tarriff) small island peoples, who grow bananas the beautiful romantic traditional way, from the big bad Chiquita Bananas, grown with intense chemical use by underpaid Central American workers: the "better grown" product again just can't compete.

Ergo, there is no logical connection between the externality and the marketability of the item. Your logic does not follow.

(See, I'm not so bad at chess. ;) )

* Foundation for International Environmental Law & Development and
United Nations Commission on Trade & Development

[ 09-23-2003, 11:03 AM: Message edited by: Timber Loftis ]

The Indian Apple, an apple is an apple, if the apple doesn't kill you something else will.

I would suggest having safety regulation labels on foods.

EVEN if your Indian apple has an organic sticker on it, without a safety label, how far will it go?

Yet if people risking that for a lower price don't find a problem with it, then you have a market!!

But for those picky rich people, the US farmers remain their seller.

Competition.

The problem with labeling products as 'organic' or similar is to come up with a standard that everyone uses. Alot of companies uses their own labels and the same knid of label can differ in content from company to company.

I've been on a lot of demonstrations for a lot of different causes, most of the related to the current economic situation, and I can say quite catagorically that that is the most spectacular missing of the point I've ever seen.

It really bugs me that people think that if I'm anti-capitalist then I'm anti-globalisation, as being anti-globalisation is such an easy position to destroy. Its completely stupid to be against the coming together of the world, and as a socialist I feel that it is in fact essential for the acheivement of my ideology. If you think that the left is against globalisation then you'd be in for a shock if you ever actually listened to what the people on those protests were saying.

As Donut says - do you want to include some smilies in your post? Its almost so devolved from reality that its beyond parody...

I'd like to hear that too sometime, unfortunately they hardly ever talk, since they're too busy demolishing the city where it all takes place.

Ok, I don't know how it works in the Netherlands, but over here that kind of stuff is greatly exaggerrated in the media and usually only perpetrated by a small minority of protestors.

Look at it this way - if you were a reporter going to a demo and saw 990 people standing around with signs handing out leaflets and 10 people breaking windows who would you base your story on. The destructive idiots are just more newsworthy.

If it really worked that way, the WTO talks would not have failed as the developing countries would not have had anything to complain about.

In reality, third world agro-products cost more in the western stores - while simultaneously, western agro exports to third world countries are cheaper than home-grown produce, sending local third-world farmers out of business.

There are a variety of reasons for this, including ecomomy of scale (the average US farm is massive in comparison to its 3rd world competitor, usage of GM crops which do not need weed-killers, usage of weed-killers (for non-GM crops) and fertilisers to boost the success of crops, massive market over-supply deflating prices and, most importantly, comparitively *huge* government subsidies to farmers (esp. in the EU). You can get an overview of who stood to win/lose what here.

As Timber Loftus says: "To extend the example past the apple and use a few real-world examples:
1. On manufactured goods: the VW bug made in Mexico is made under less strict enviro standards yet no one asks "how much soil did you pollute or laborers were injured/underpaid when making this car" when they buy a car."
Western nations argue that such a lack of standards and controls effectively amounts to a state-subsidy to third world countries and, as such, is pulling industrial jobs and income away from the west.
Furthermore, most developing countries do not have an open bidding process for tenders - for example, one of four companies bidding to build a motorway wins the contract: but the details of that company's bid remain secret even after they have won the contract - leading the other company's to suspsect foul play.
And if that wasn't enough, many developing companies slap on huge import taxes on industrial goods - further weakening the competitiveness of western manufactured products.

I don't know how it works in the US, but in the EU all food imports are carefully monitored and tested for safety and if there is any doubt over the safety of food or any suspicion that food is 'contaminated' in some way, the *entire* shipment is sent back. (Which has led to huge rows with the US because some shipments of Grain labeled as GM free were sent back because there were low traces (ie 0.01%) of GM grain found within them). So it's highly unlikely that the western supermarkets will find themselves loaded with 3rd world food that is riddled with DDT.
I'm fairly sure that the US follows the same kind of strict food safety policy.

Well, there is the Left and there is the Left. There is the informed and the uninformed coupled with the rational and irrational.

There are left wingers who believe that the rich should always look after the poor regardless of the circumstances, and there are 'left wingers' who believe that the rich should only look after those who are incapable of looking after themselves and <u>assist</u> the rest to make something of their lives.

I personally fall into that latter category, and as a result, fully support the WTO. Looking at it logically, in order for 3rd world countries to become wealthy, they need to move away from agro-based economies to industrial based ones - so the flood of cheap food into their countries will help to release labour from the field to the factory, and will lead to the consolidation of existing farms into larger ones - where the economies of scale can be achieved.

One also has to be realistic too. In a perfect world we would all give up our worldly possessions and there wouldn't be poverty because everyone would have the same riches. But in reality, rich people don't want to become poor, and those who are comfortably off don't want to struggle to survive. As a result, one has to take into account the demands of western nations into account.

A compromise could be reached with western countries - whereby financial penalties are imposed on western companies attempting to move shop to 3rd world countries - but where the import tariffs remain the same.

In my perfect world of the future, I'd like to see western countries economies as largely based on agriculture, technology and services - with the '3rd world' countries as the new industrial nations (with environmental regulations, decent pay etc.) It would not be an unrealistic evolution of the world economy.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that many 3rd world countries want to have their cake and eat it. They want the west to buy goods which were manufactured without attention to the environment or the health of the workers and to accept farm goods which were produced not only in an uneconomic way, but which are also of lower quality and potentially hazardous to health. The west is then supposed to get poorer while they get richer. Well, that's unrealistic because it goes against human nature.

Not to mention all the subsidies that practically ruin every Indian farmer. ;)

Anywho, I wholeheartedly agree with Timber. Wait, who said that? [img]graemlins/uhoh1.gif[/img] :D

On your first point, whilst the lunacy of some of the left never fails to suprise me I think that for the most part the idea of the totally irrational nay-saying leftist is a colourful and amusing myth. Overall the left wing tends to be quite well educated and know what its talking about.

Also I'd just like to stress in relation to your second point that there are other positions than the ones you've mentioned above that left-wingers tend to take. My position personally is that the poor shouldn't rely on the rich to do anything for them. Its not about charity, its about revolution.

<font color="#C4C1CA">Well I used to be a labour party member and I used to live in the North of England and I guarantee you that the irrational nay-saying left was alive and well the last time I was there.

Education does not neccessarily imply rationality - there are still a large number of labour voters who believe that the rich should pay ever higher taxes to fund social programs and it has yet to cross their minds that the rich have their limit. It was almost impossible to explain to them that if you tax the rich hard enough, they will simply leave the country, taking their money with them.

Here in the Netherlands, many rich people did just that: they fled just over the border into Belgium where they officially live - but continue to work in the Netherlands!

As you say, the left covers a very broad spectrum of views - and it is quite funny but again, right here in the Netherlands I vote for one of the right wing parties because the official left is far too left for my liking: they happen to be 'mythical nay-saying leftists'...

And, like you, I believe in the concept of 'hand-ups not handouts' - a revolutionary concept for the left in the Netherlands.</font>