Free Trade Impacts

GDI Scholars
1 Free trade impacts
Free trade impacts

Free trade impacts ................................................................................................................................................................. 1 ***FREE TRADE GOOD.................................................................................................................................................... 2 War ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 3 War ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 4 War ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 5 War ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 6 War ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 7 War ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 8 Economy................................................................................................................................................................................ 9 Economy.............................................................................................................................................................................. 10 Economy.............................................................................................................................................................................. 11 Better than protectionism.................................................................................................................................................... 12 North/South ......................................................................................................................................................................... 13 North/South ......................................................................................................................................................................... 14 Poverty/development .......................................................................................................................................................... 15 Famine ................................................................................................................................................................................. 16 Famine ................................................................................................................................................................................. 17 South Asia ........................................................................................................................................................................... 18 Environment ........................................................................................................................................................................ 19 Democracy........................................................................................................................................................................... 20 Terrorism ............................................................................................................................................................................. 21 Terrorism ............................................................................................................................................................................. 22 Democracy........................................................................................................................................................................... 23 Democracy........................................................................................................................................................................... 24 Heg....................................................................................................................................................................................... 25 Racism ................................................................................................................................................................................. 26 Environment ........................................................................................................................................................................ 27 A2: Culture .......................................................................................................................................................................... 28 ***FREE TRADE BAD ..................................................................................................................................................... 29 War ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 30 War ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 31 A2: Free trade solves war ................................................................................................................................................... 32 Info-war ............................................................................................................................................................................... 33 Environment ........................................................................................................................................................................ 34 Environment ........................................................................................................................................................................ 35 Monocultures....................................................................................................................................................................... 36 Monocultures....................................................................................................................................................................... 37 Economy.............................................................................................................................................................................. 38 North/South ......................................................................................................................................................................... 39 North/South ......................................................................................................................................................................... 40 Poverty................................................................................................................................................................................. 41 Culture ................................................................................................................................................................................. 42 Culture ................................................................................................................................................................................. 43 Patriarchy............................................................................................................................................................................. 44 Food shortages..................................................................................................................................................................... 45 Food shortages..................................................................................................................................................................... 46 Tobacco ............................................................................................................................................................................... 47 Democracy........................................................................................................................................................................... 48 Prolif .................................................................................................................................................................................... 49 Terrorism ............................................................................................................................................................................. 50 Hurts war on terror .............................................................................................................................................................. 51
GDI Scholars
***FREE TRADE GOOD
GDI Scholars
War
Protectionism causes nuclear war Michael Spicer, economist; member of the British Parliament, The Challenge from the East and the Rebirth of the West, 1996, p. 121
The choice facing the West today is much the same as that which faced the Soviet bloc after World War II: between meeting head-on the challenge of world trade with the adjustments and the benefits that it will bring, or of attempting to shut out markets that are growing and where a dynamic new pace is being set for innovative production. The problem about the second approach is not simply that it won't hold: satellite technology alone will ensure that he consumers will begin to demand those goods that the East is able to provide most cheaply. More fundamentally, it will guarantee the emergence of a fragmented world in which natural fears will be fanned and inflamed. A world divided into rigid trade blocs will be a deeply troubled and unstable place in which suspicion and ultimately envy will possibly erupt into a major war. I do not say that the converse will necessarily be true, that in a free trading world there will be an absence of all strife. Such a proposition would manifestly be absurd. But to trade is to become interdependent, and that is a good step in the direction of world stability. With nuclear weapons at two a penny, stability will be at a premium in the years ahead.
Free trade prevents nuclear war Copley News Service, December 1, 1999
For decades, many children in America and other countries went to bed fearing annihilation by nuclear war. The specter of nuclear winter freezing the life out of planet Earth seemed very real. Activists protesting the World Trade Organization's meeting in Seattle apparently have forgotten that threat. The truth is that nations join together in groups like the WTO not just to further their own prosperity, but also to forestall conflict with other nations. In a way, our planet has traded in the threat of a worldwide nuclear war for the benefit of cooperative global economics. Some Seattle protesters clearly fancy themselves to be in the mold of nuclear disarmament or anti-Vietnam War protesters of decades past. But they're not. They're special-interest activists, whether the cause is environmental, labor or paranoia about global government. Actually, most of the demonstrators in Seattle are very much unlike yesterday's peace activists, such as Beatle John Lennon or philosopher Bertrand Russell, the father of the nuclear disarmament movement, both of whom urged people and nations to work together rather than strive against each other. These and other war protesters would probably approve of 135 WTO nations sitting down peacefully to discuss economic issues that in the past might have been settled by bullets and bombs. As long as nations are trading peacefully, and their economies are built on exports to other countries, they have a major disincentive to wage war. That's why bringing China, a budding superpower, into the WTO is so important. As exports to the United States and the rest of the world feed Chinese prosperity, and that prosperity increases demand for the goods we produce, the threat of hostility diminishes. Many anti-trade protesters in Seattle claim that only multinational corporations benefit from global trade, and that it's the everyday wage earners who get hurt. That's just plain wrong. First of all, it's not the military-industrial complex benefiting. It's U.S. companies that make high-tech goods. And those companies provide a growing number of jobs for Americans. In San Diego, many people have good jobs at Qualcomm, Solar Turbines and other companies for whom overseas markets are essential. In Seattle, many of the 100,000 people who work at Boeing would lose their livelihoods without world trade. Foreign trade today accounts for 30 percent of our gross domestic product. That's a lot of jobs for everyday workers. Growing global prosperity has helped counter the specter of nuclear winter. Nations of the world are learning to live and work together, like the singers of anti-war songs once imagined. Those who care about world peace shouldn't be protesting world trade. They should be celebrating it.
GDI Scholars
War
Free trade ends the nationalism that drives conflicts a global body politic ensures peace Jason Brooks, Department of Journalism at Carleton University, 1999 ed. Independent Institute Make Trade, Not
War http://www.independent.org/tii/students/GarveyEssay99Brooks.html Different people have different solutions to war; none are as logical as free trade. The war hawks have pursued a policy of mutual assured destruction, arguing that bigger weapons make better deterrents. Others have argued for disarmament. While the causes of war are undoubtedly varied, protectionism clearly invites conflict. To this, free trade is a remedy. While diplomacy is important, there can be no better diplomacy than that which exists between common citizens of the world every day in a thousand spheres of life. The more free trade we have, the more the invisible hand of the market helps us to, while working for our own advancement, create a world of peace. The wellbeing of others becomes our own. There is no reason why, in a world of perfect free trade, people worldwide shouldn't get along as well as the citizens of the happiest, most prosperous democracies. For in a world of free trade it matters little where borders are drawn. "Make love, not war," was a slogan once bandied about as an answer to war. It was a catchy phrase -- and an appealing message given the two options. But it wasn't too practical. The real solution to war, if condensed to the size of a placard, would instead read, "Make trade, not war."
All empirical examples demonstrate that protectionism causes massive wars Vincent Miller, founder and President of the International Society for Individual Liberty, and James Elwood, Vice-President of the International Society for Individual Liberty, Free Trade of Protectionism? 1988,
http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/free-trade-protectionism.html, accessed 1/3/03 History is not lacking in examples of cold trade wars escalating into hot shooting wars: Europe suffered from almost non-stop wars during the 17th and 18th centuries, when restrictive trade policy (mercantilism) was the rule; rival governments fought each other to expand their empires and to exploit captive markets. British tariffs provoked the American colonists to revolution, and later the Northern-dominated U.S. government imposed restrictions on Southern cotton exports a major factor leading to the American Civil War. In the late 19th Century, after a half century of general free trade (which brought a half-century of peace), short-sighted politicians throughout Europe again began erecting trade barriers. Hostilities built up until they eventually exploded into World War I. In 1930, facing only a mild recession, U.S. President Hoover ignored warning pleas in a petition by 1028 prominent economists and signed the notorious SmootHawley Act, which raised some tariffs to 100% levels. Within a year, over 25 other governments had retaliated by passing similar laws. The result? World trade came to a grinding halt, and the entire world was plunged into the "Great Depression" for the rest of the decade. The depression in turn led to World War II. The # 1 Danger To World Peace The world enjoyed its greatest economic growth during the relatively free trade period of 1945-1970, a period that also saw no major wars. Yet we again see trade barriers being raised around the world by short-sighted politicians. Will the world again end up in a shooting war as a result of these economically deranged policies? Can we afford to allow this to happen in the nuclear age? "What generates war is the economic philosophy of nationalism: embargoes, trade and foreign exchange controls, monetary devaluation, etc. The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war."
Protectionism escalates to war Robert McGee, professor in the W. Paul Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University, 1994, A Trade
Policy for Free Societies, p. 50 Another reason for free trade is that it enhances international cooperation. Countries that trade with each other are less likely to go to war than are countries that erect trade barriers to prevent foreign goods from crossing their borders. If goods do not cross borders, armies will. Trading with our neighbors is friendly and neighborly. Peaceful exchange between individuals enhances harmony. Erecting trade barriers, resorting to name calling and Buy American campaigns, and other forms of economic nationalism are unfriendly and promote ill-will and discord. Military conflicts often start as trade wars, then escalate.
GDI Scholars
War
Free trade forces countries to negotiate rather than fight to resolve conflicts Jason Brooks, Department of Journalism at Carleton University, 1999 ed. Independent Institute Make Trade, Not
War http://www.independent.org/tii/students/GarveyEssay99Brooks.html We have shown how trade gives people freedom and creates incentives for peace. Still, a student of history might look at the ceaseless legacy of war from ancient times to modern day and wonder if mankind is fundamentally evil. He might throw up his arms in frustration and ask, what good will trade do when it is clear we can't get along? One of the greatest gifts of trade is that it teaches us to do just that. It teaches us to get along. And, while this essay doesn't attempt to make any pronouncements on the fundamental goodness of human nature, it is encouraging that where citizens live in greatest peace is where they interact on their own terms; where they are at war is where government representation replaces civil interaction. The fundamental reason why democracies don't fight, writes Rummel, is that they come from an "exchange culture." This is a culture that develops "wherever there is the art of bargaining and exchange over goods, services, and ideas." The exchange culture, by definition, breeds cooperation. "Businesses of all sorts compete to sell their wares. There are the disputes, the broken contracts and agreements, the misunderstandings, the fraud and abuse," writes Rummel. But the give and take of trade trains people to resolve conflicts in peace every day. Indeed, Rummel suggests one way to look at international relations between individuals is as interacting in a state of anarchy. Despite no world government in the true sense of the word, people still manage to cooperate and get along -- in fact they do it exceedingly well. Trade is so important to peace, we can see it encouraging peace in capitalist countries that aren't yet democracies. Governments such as Chile and Taiwan before they became democracies, were not as peaceful as democracies, but still far less prone to aggression than autocracies. The reason is that their cultures are based on the principle of free exchange. Free trade creates a world community of individuals working in harmony. Common citizens replace power-driven politicians and war-driven militaries as de facto ambassadors. One added bonus is that, while we may always have politicians, in a world where an exchange culture reigns, they will be selected from within this exchange culture, bringing to their jobs the very inclinations to bargain and compromise that work so well in creating peace in civil society.
Free trade brings peace by increasing the costs of waging war Jason Brooks, Department of Journalism at Carleton University, 1999 ed. Independent Institute Make Trade, Not
War http://www.independent.org/tii/students/GarveyEssay99Brooks.html Free trade is, in one sense, like a nuclear weapon. Which seems strange to say because trade is associated with peace and prosperity, while nuclear weapons are synonymous with apocalypse and terror. But here is how they are alike: they both prevent war by making it more costly. A strong argument exists that the only reason the Cold War never got "hot" between the United States and the Soviet Union was that nuclear weapons made outright conflict unthinkable. Trade, in a similar way, binds the fortunes of people in the world together. It is the best assurance of peace. By forging bonds between customers and suppliers around the world, trade gives citizens a vested interest in the wellbeing of people in other countries -- war becomes a matter of mutual assured destruction, if you will. With trade, a war abroad will have fallout at home. But while trade has the deterrent effects of powerful weapons, is far preferable because of its other advantages. Where weapons are expensive, free trade brings prosperity and freedom. Where weapons bring terror, free trade fosters harmony and encourages people to resolve disputes without violence. Richard Cobden, a nineteenth century British industrialist and politician, often argued in favor of trade over armaments to discourage war. His recipe for peace remains as true today as it was more than 150 years ago: "The more any nation traffics abroad upon free and honest principles, the less it will be in danger of wars." Free trade is indeed the wellspring of peace.
GDI Scholars
War
PROTECTIONISM SPURS WAR WASHINGTON MONTHLY, Autumn 1993, p.38.
Global concern about the environment is paralleled by concern in the international trade community about the impact of protectionist policies on international economic growth. Here again, the concern is profound and goes beyond anxiety over the negative impact that protectionist policies will have on short-term economic growth. Instead, the trade community's concerns arise from deeply held conviction, stemming greatly from events occurring between World Wars I and II that protectionist trade policies poison relations between nations by lowering economic growth rates. Under Secretary of State Sumner Wells expressed this sentiment in 1941: "Nations have more often than not undertaken economic discriminations and raised up trade barriers with complete disregard for the damaging effects on the trade and livelihood of other peoples, and, ironically though, with similar disregard for the harmful effect on their own export trade .... The resultant misery, bewilderment, and resentment .... together with equally pernicious contributing causes paved the way for the rise of those very dictatorships which have plunged almost the entire world into war."
PROTECTIONISM SPURS GLOBAL UNREST - SEVERE CONFRONTATIONS Michael Spicer, Author of THE CHALLENGE FROM THE EAST, 1996, p.121.
The choice facing the West today is much the same as that which faced the Soviet bloc after World War II: between meeting head-on the challenge of world trade with the adjustments and the benefits that it will bring, or of attempting to shut out markets that are growing and where a dynamic new pace is being set for innovative production. The problem about the second approach is not simply that it won't hold: satellite technology alone will ensure that consumers will begin to demand those goods that the Fast is able to provide most cheaply. More fundamentally, it will guarantee the emergence of a fragmented world in which natural fears will be fanned and inflamed. A world divided into rigid trade blocs will be a deeply troubled and unstable place in which suspicion and ultimately envy will possibly erupt into a major war. I do not say that the converse will necessarily be true, that in a free trading world there will be an absence of all strife. Such a proposition would manifestly be absurd. But to trade is to become interdependent, and that is a good step in the direction of world stability. With nuclear weapons at two a penny, stability will be at a premium in the years ahead,
PROTECTIONISM LEADS TO GLOBAL UNREST AND WAR Walter Mead, World Policy Institute, HARPER'S, August 21, 1993, p.44.
But the protectionist option is an illusion. Because the United States is the world's leading exporter, U.S. jobs and economic prospects depend on the continued willingness of other countries to receive our exports. We can be certain that if we slain our doors shut, other countries will retaliate. We must also worry about war. Closing our doors to goods from Russia, China, and India will wreck their economies and set the stage for an era of international confrontation that would make the Cold War look like Woodstock.
TRADE REDUCES WAR BY INCREASING COSTS Dr. Stephen Horowitz, Free trade and the climb out of poverty, No Date Given
http://www.totse.com/en/politics/economic_documents/164121.html One further benefit of free trade is that it promotes international peace. Countries who trade with one another create mutual interdependence, which raises the cost of armed conflict. If one country depends on another for cheap goods and services, what gain is there to a military invasion or the like? Where interdependence is the nature of the relationship, fates are tied and war makes little sense. International conflict flows out of the sort of nationalism that results from restrictions on free trade. Just as democracies do not go to war with other democracies, so it is that countries with open trading relationships do not go to war. Peace and free trade have a long and storied history, and the very same thinkers who have argued for free trade, and have been excoriated for it by the anti-militarist left, did so because they believed it would promote international harmony and peace. The critics of free trade need to re-read both economic history and the history of ideas and realize that their opposition to free trade is likely to increase international military activity, not reduce it.
GDI Scholars
War
TRADE REDUCES CONFLICT BECAUSE BUSINESSES AND INDIVIDUALS THAT BENEFIT FROM IT PRESSURE THEIR GOVERNMENT TO RESOLVE DISPUTES PEACEFULLY Mark J. C. Crescenzi, University of North Carolina, 2002, Economic Interdependence and Conflict in World
Politics, http://www.unc.edu/~crescenz/exit/crescenzi_9_02.pdf. Domke argues that the increase in wealth within each country resulting from trade generates a snowballing effect on political conflict. Those who benefit from this increase in wealth put pressure upon their governments to seek peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries. Preserving the flow of economic interaction through peace and diplomacy becomes a priority that can dwarf more traditional security concerns. Governments become more responsive to their citizens, and these citizens seek to protect their newfound prosperity by encouraging their governments to cooperate with other nations. Rosecrance (1986) provides a similar argument, associating increased trade with increased costs of fighting wars. As wars become more costly, alternative paths to pursuing political objectives become more appealing, but the mechanism by which trade alters state goals such that conflict becomes an outmoded and inefficient political tool remains unclear. Domke (1988) also investigates the empirical relationship between interdependence and conflict on the systemic level. He proposes the hypothesis that greater levels of international trade for a state decreases the likelihood that the state will engage in war, and finds strong support for the negative relationship between international trade and war in an empirical investigation.
TRADE REDUCES CONFLICT BY INCREASING THE COSTS OF WAR Jon C. Pevehouse, University of Wisconsin-Madison, February 2004, Interdependence Theory and the
Measurement of International Conflict, Journal of Politics, Volume 66, Issue 1, http://www.journalofpolitics.org/Contents/Vol66/arts661/pevehouse.pdf. A second and more common logic posits that open commerce dampens political conflict by promoting economic dependence. This argument, which Stein (1993: 253) refers to as ?binding commercial liberalism?, has been stressed in most recent studies of international conflict (Oneal and Russett 1997, 1999a). Open trade encourages specialization in the production of goods and services, rendering private traders and consumers dependent on foreign markets. These actors have an incentive to avoid wars with key trading partners, since disruptions in commercial relations would be costly. Governments, which have reason to respond to demands made by key constituents and to enhance a country?s economic performance, face similar incentives.
TRADE REDUCES CONFLICT BY INCREASING COMMON INTERESTS Min Ye, Department of Government and International Studies, University of South Carolina, 2001,
Comparative Kantian Peace Theory: Economic Interdependence and International Conflict at a Group Level Analysis, http://www.cla.sc.edu/poli/psrw/MinYe1026.pdf. Liberals believed that democracy and trade would reduce the incidence of war. According to liberals, wars were the result of international misunderstanding and domination of society by the warrior class. Both factors could be reduced by commerce: trade brought individuals of different nations into contact with one another and created common interests; and it increased the prosperity and political power of the peaceful productive members of society at the expense of the aristocracy (Domke 1988, 43-51; Howard 1978).
GDI Scholars
War
TRADE PROMOTES PEACE IN MANY WAYS Min Ye, Department of Government and International Studies, University of South Carolina, 2001,
Comparative Kantian Peace Theory: Economic Interdependence and International Conflict at a Group Level Analysis, http://www.cla.sc.edu/poli/psrw/MinYe1026.pdf. Although research advances have been limited, the effects of economic interdependence on international politics have been studied decades. Theoretically, these studies can be divided into three categories according to their different arguments regarding trade functionality in international relations. The first category, from an interest groups perspective, argues that trade has a pacifying effect. Ruth Arad and Seev Hirsch (1981) observe that trade can enhance peace between former belligerents by capturing the impact of trade on the states' welfare with respect to consumers, producers, exporters and importers. Solomon Polachek (1992, 1997), Polachek and McDonald (1992) note that trade and investment serve as media for communicating interests, preferences, and needs on a broad range of matters among trading partners. However, this perspective fails to account for conflict over the division of costs and of gains, assumption of new risks, and relation of new vested interests. Thus the effect of these vested interests on domestic support for peace is indeterminate unless the government compensates the losers in economic transactions. The second category focuses on the overall social welfare gains from trade (Polachek 1980, 60-62 and 1992). According to this model, each trading nation gains social welfare benefits and therefore has a strong interest in maintaining peaceful relations. Polachek (1980) has argued that the greater the welfare loss, the greater the costs of conflict, and thus the smaller the incentive for conflict. However, this national-gains perspective fails to account for some anomalies in world politics caused by the sensitivity and vulnerability of interdependence (Keohane and Nye 1989).
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE THAT TRADE REDUCES INCIDENCE OF MAJOR POWER WARS Mark J. C. Crescenzi, University of North Carolina, 2002, Economic Interdependence and Conflict in World
Politics, http://www.unc.edu/~crescenz/exit/crescenzi_9_02.pdf. Mansfield empirically analyzes this relationship between international trade and war on the systemic level. He finds strong support for this negative relationship between trade and war, as well as support for the causal direction of trade as an influence of war. In particular, he oncludes that international trade is inversely related to the incidence of wars involving major powers.
ECONOMIC ADVANTAGES OF TRADE ENCOURAGE STATES TO AVOID CONFLICTS Mark J. C. Crescenzi, University of North Carolina, 2002, Economic Interdependence and Conflict in World
Politics, http://www.unc.edu/~crescenz/exit/crescenzi_9_02.pdf. Solomon Polachek has been putting together pieces of this research puzzle for almost twenty years, and he continues to develop some of the most sophisticated arguments supporting the perspective that trade promotes peace. The argument is grounded in the notion of conflict as an inefficient drain on economic welfare. Trade relations emerge naturally through comparative advantage and resource allocations. Once this trade is in place, states will avoid conflict to preserve the resulting welfare improvements. He argues, "countries involved in more trade have on balance higher costs of conflict, and hence ceteris paribus are hypothesized to engage in less conflict" (1978: 73). He also briefly examines the notion that states possessing advantages or monopolies in trade markets enjoy a greater freedom to be hostile without worrying about reciprocation from trading partners. This would suggest that the market structure that provides context for the trade relationship is important when studying how trade affects conflict. His empirical tests focus on the dyadic level and the basic relationship between trade and conflict (as trade increases, conflict decreases). The results indicate strong support for the negative relationship between trade and conflict.
GDI Scholars
Economy
Protectionism causes economic collapse and war World War 2 proves the correlation Jim Chen, Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, Fordham International Law Journal, November / December, 2000, 24 Fordham Int'l L.J. 217
War, needless to say, retards trade. Although the converse proposition - that trade retards war - may be less obvious, it happens to be the strongest noneconomic argument for free trade. Amid the devastation of World War II, this argument was dispositive. The rules and institutions that govern international economic relations today grew out of a belated understanding that peace cannot flourish in a world burdened by trade barriers. The October 1929 collapse of American stock markets destroyed the twin "cornerstones of German prosperity: loans from abroad, principally from America, and world trade." By "signing ... the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act into law in June 1930," Herbert Hoover committed the "most disastrous single mistake any U.S. president [ever] made in international relations." Retaliatory tariffs helped transform a trade war into actual military conflict; the destruction of trade accelerated a deflationary spiral that had begun with major powers' collective retreat to the gold standard. The ensuing "major world depression" energized "the nationalists in Japanese politics and paved the way for the electoral victory of the Nazis in Germany in 1932." When at last military victory seemed within reach, the allies convened at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to lay the economic foundation for postwar peace. The three institutions born of that summit - the IMF, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (or "GATT"), forerunner of the WTO - received an unequivocal mandate to keep the peace. By and large, the Bretton Woods institutions have succeeded. Until NATO forces bombed Yugoslavia in 1999, Thomas Friedman's "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Avoidance" accurately described international relations after World War II: no two nations with a McDonald's restaurant waged war against each other. Although the global economy would later destroy one of Bretton Woods' most ambitious achievements - the system of fixed exchange rates for the world's leading currencies - this peace dividend remains one of the strongest arguments in favor of free trade.
The WTO is key to world economic growth; US lead is vital. CONGRESSMAN PHILIP CRANE, Federal News Service, December 13, 1999
And the American people have not yet come to a full realization and understanding of the importance of trade to our national growth, but the importance of trade also to other countries. It's a win-win proposition. And we have witnessed the smaller countries of the world finally elevating to levels that they can join the World Trade Organization. And we've had some of the smaller countries, as you know -- most recently, I think there were five more that have become members of WTO -- and it's a move in the right direction. But the -- (inaudible) -- the so-called major players are still the EU, Japan, the U.S. and Canada. And they're the ones that have to lead the charge in the direction of moving farther down that path and with greater spirit than we have moved thus far, and especially after what happened out there in Seattle. Now, under our ground rules in Congress, we have to renew our personal membership in WTO every five years. That requires a vote by Congress. Are we going to remain a member of the World Trade Organization? And we have a kind of dicey condition today coming out of the negative that was a consequence of what happened out in Seattle. And we have, as you know, interest, and there is representing a very small fragment -- 12 percent of our total labor population is unionized, but they are organized, and they are organized and involved in political races, and they will continue with a vengeance to be involved in political races, and they have their own separate agenda. And then there are others within both our Republican and Democrat parties who are simply protectionist. I've mentioned many times I used to be a history prof before I got into politics, and historically the Democrats were the free traders all the time and the Republicans were the protectionists. And that prevailed until after World War II. And after World War II, we were the only industrial power left on the face of the earth, and the unions had a privileged position and they wanted to keep it. And they were the ones that exerted paramount influence in the Democratic Party. And the Republicans, to their credit, finally started to lift the blinders and read Milton Friedman and Von Hayek and others, and understand the importance of free trade. But we still have Smoots and Hawleys in our Republican ranks, and you remember they pushed through the most protectionist tariff measure in history in 1930, and that guaranteed that our depression went worldwide and that extended until after World War II. So we still have Smoots and Hawleys on our Republican side.
GDI Scholars
Economy
SLIDE INTO PROTECTIONISM CRUSHES THE GLOBAL ECONOMY Fred Bergsten, Director of the Institute for International Economics, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, March/April, 1999, pg. Lexis
Both sides now run the risk of drift and even paralysis in transatlantic trade policy -- with potentially severe repercussions for the rest of the world. A slide into protectionism or even a failure to continue opening new markets would have a major impact on the global trading system. Could we then expect Asian economies, who depend on expanded exports to emerge from their deep recessions, to keep their own markets open? Would the transition economies in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Asia stick to their liberalization strategies? With the backlash against globalization already evident everywhere, the ominous inward-looking protectionist and nationalistic policies that the world has rejected so decisively could reemerge once again. A failure of transatlantic leadership would make such policy reversals particularly likely. The United States and the EU are the only economic superpowers and the only two regions enjoying reasonable economic growth. They created the GATT system and, more recently, the WTO. Despite their own occasional transgressions, they have nurtured and defended the system throughout its evolution over the past 50 years. While Japan has been important on a few issues and the developing countries played an encouraging role in the Uruguay Round, the Atlantic powers built and sustained the world trade order. Their failure to maintain that commitment would devastate the entire regime.
PROTECTIONISM CRUSHES THE GLOBAL ECONOMY FINANCIAL TIMES, February 24, 1999, pg. Lexis
So US officials are right to complain about the risks of global recession and the macro-economic policy failures of Japan and the euro-zone. They may be wrong to worry about trade deficits themselves, but correct to fear the political backlash at home these are likely to cause, particularly if the economy slowed. It is essential therefore to develop a strategy for handling trade policy while the world economy comes back into balance. The economic impact of trade policy is on efficiency and growth, not deficits. If the US resorted to protection, it would merely shift the pressure on to unprotected activities, including exports, probably via appreciation of the dollar. Protection is therefore a self-defeating response to the need to adjust to changes in net capital flows. Policymakers understand this. The big danger, however, is that political pressures will lead to backsliding on trade commitments that would increase uncertainty, dampen Asian recovery and undermine the health of the global economy.
FREE TRADE BENEFITS THE U.S. ECONOMY John Sweeney, Heritage,FAST TRACK NEGOTIATING AUTHORITY: THE FACTS, August 26, 1998, p.
http://www.heritage.org/library/execmemo/em549.html The free trade agreements achieved under fast-track authority have produced tangible benefits for the American economy. Now in its eighth consecutive year of economic expansion, the United States is the world's largest exporter and importer of merchandise goods and services, and the largest manufacturer of sophisticated semiconductors, automobiles, and software. The United States reports the highest productivity and competitiveness of any economy in the world, creates more jobs each year than any other industrialized economy, and accounts for 25 percent of all global foreign investment each year. In 1997, two-way U.S. trade with the world--defined by the Clinton Administration as trade in goods and services plus earnings on U.S. foreign investment abroad--totaled $2.3 trillion, or 30 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), compared with only 13 percent of GDP in 1970.
GDI Scholars
Economy
SLIDE INTO PROTECTIONISM CRUSHES THE GLOBAL ECONOMY Fred Bergsten, Director of the Institute for International Economics, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, March/April, 1999, p. Lexis
Both sides now run the risk of drift and even paralysis in transatlantic trade policy -- with potentially severe repercussions for the rest of the world. A slide into protectionism or even a failure to continue opening new markets would have a major impact on the global trading system. Could we then expect Asian economies, who depend on expanded exports to emerge from their deep recessions, to keep their own markets open? Would the transition economies in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Asia stick to their liberalization strategies? With the backlash against globalization already evident everywhere, the ominous inward-looking protectionist and nationalistic policies that the world has rejected so decisively could reemerge once again. A failure of transatlantic leadership would make such policy reversals particularly likely. The United States and the EU are the only economic superpowers and the only two regions enjoying reasonable economic growth. They created the GATT system and, more recently, the WTO. Despite their own occasional transgressions, they have nurtured and defended the system throughout its evolution over the past 50 years. While Japan has been important on a few issues and the developing countries played an encouraging role in the Uruguay Round, the Atlantic powers built and sustained the world trade order. Their failure to maintain that commitment would devastate the entire regime.
PROTECTIONISM CRUSHES THE GLOBAL ECONOMY FINANCIAL TIMES, February 24, 1999, p. Lexis
So US officials are right to complain about the risks of global recession and the macro-economic policy failures of Japan and the euro-zone. They may be wrong to worry about trade deficits themselves, but correct to fear the political backlash at home these are likely to cause, particularly if the economy slowed. It is essential therefore to develop a strategy for handling trade policy while the world economy comes back into balance. The economic impact of trade policy is on efficiency and growth, not deficits. If the US resorted to protection, it would merely shift the pressure on to unprotected activities, including exports, probably via appreciation of the dollar. Protection is therefore a self-defeating response to the need to adjust to changes in net capital flows. Policymakers understand this. The big danger, however, is that political pressures will lead to backsliding on trade commitments that would increase uncertainty, dampen Asian recovery and undermine the health of the global economy.
COLLAPSE OF FREE TRADE LEADS TO RECESSION

SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE, December 5, 1998, p. C1 According to the WTO report, written by chief economist Patrick Low, Asian exports shrank 7 percent during the first nine months of 1997, while imports plummeted 16 percent. During the same period, U.S. imports grew 10 percent, picking up the slack of declines in purchasing through other regions of the world. In light of those figures, Low wrote, "the role of the United States in sustaining global trade expansion . . . has been very significant." Low conceded that the growing trade gaps have spurred protectionist measures, not only in the United States but also in developing countries. But he feared that if the trade slowed, it would hamper a recovery in Asia and, as a result, further threaten the economies of Europe and the United States. "Pressing on with trade liberalization is essential to restore health to the world economy," he said. "If the momentum in the direction of liberalization stops, recession becomes a real prospect."
GDI Scholars
Better than protectionism

The alternative to globalization is devastating protectionism Jim Chen, Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, Fordham International Law Journal, November / December, 2000, 24 Fordham Int'l L.J. 217
Nor has localism propounded plausible solutions to challenges such as food security, AIDS and other epidemiological crises, and barriers to full equality for women and children. The localist package of autarky, retaliatory protectionism, and isolationism would be catastrophic. It really is a shame that Ralph Nader will probably not be named "the first U.S. ambassador to North Korea," where he could "get a real taste of what a country that actually follows [his] insane economic philosophy - high protectionism, economic autarky, antimarkets, antiglobalization, anti-multinationals - is like for the people who live there." The policies preferred by the protesters at Seattle and Prague guarantee penury for most, security for some, and power for an unjustly privileged few. That way runs anew the road to serfdom.
Trade is better than domestic competition New Republic, June 22, 1998
What trade has going for it, of course, is economics. The most astonishing thing about Buchanan's book is that, although it is ostensibly about economics, it almost never engages in genuinely economic thinking. For Buchanan, the decision to expand or to restrict trade is mainly a political choice. Thus he ignores lower communications and transportation costs (container ships, transoceanic telephone cables, jets, satellites, and, now, the Internet) as driving forces; and as the cost of doing business across borders goes down, the demand to do business--including political pressures to permit it--goes up. Neither Buchanan nor anyone else can repeal this relationship. Certainly countries can prevent trade by shutting themselves off from the world (as China did until the late 1970s), but it is harder and harder to do with surgical precision. With trade comes travel, and modern communications, and global finance. Controlling the process has proven arduous even for the countries (such as Japan) most determined to do so. This is one reason why more and more countries have embraced the global economy across a broad range of industries and activities. The other reason is that the potential economic gains of doing so have become self-evident. Buchanan treats the process mainly as a zero-sum game: one country's gain is another country's loss. If this were true, there would not be much global trade and investment. When losers recognized their losses, they would withdraw. Trade would occur mainly as a consequence of sheer economic necessity--countries importing essential raw materials (fuel, food, minerals) or goods produced only in a few countries (commercial jets, for example); or as a consequence of coercion--the strong compelling the weak to trade on disadvantageous terms, an informal neocolonialism. Otherwise trade would wither. What is true, of course, is that individual companies or individual workers can lose in trade. General Motors can lose to Toyota; Hitachi can lose to IBM. But what is bad for a company or an industry is not necessarily bad for a country. Moreover, domestic competition causes more job losses than trade. Consider, for example, the job losses counted by the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Between 1993 and 1997, it found almost 2.5 million job cuts by American companies. The top five industries were: aerospace and defense, 270,166; retailing, 256,834; telecommunications, 213, 675; computers, 212,033; financial services (banking, brokerage houses), 166, 672; and transportation (airlines, trucking companies), 136,008. None of these cuts involved global trade. The causes ranged from defense cutbacks (aerospace) to new technology (computers). But Buchanan wishes to leave the false impression that, but for trade, the economy would be far less turbulent and harsh.Given Buchanan's ignorance of economics, it is no surprise that his history, too, is badly warped. To suggest that the vast industrialization of the late nineteenth century, and America's rise as the world's most powerful economy, owes a great deal to protectionism is absurd. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the American economy benefited from a virtuous circle. Railroads expanded dramatically. Between 1860 and 1900, the miles of track rose from roughly 30,000 to more than 200,000. Lower transportation costs expanded markets. In turn, this encouraged investment in new manufacturing technologies that lowered costs through economies of scale. Industrial output soared for all manner of consumer goods (clothes, shoes, furniture), for farm implements, for machinery. Larger markets and lower costs fostered new methods of retailing and wholesaling: the mail-order house Sears, Roebuck was founded in 1891.
GDI Scholars
North/South
Free trade enables developing countries to catch up New Republic, June 22, 1998
This explains why poorer countries should now like trade. It has helped lift millions of people in Europe and Asia from abject poverty. But what's in it for us? Trade can help to erode a country's relative economic superiority, and for the United States it has contributed to such an erosion. As other countries advanced rapidly, our dominance of the early postwar decades was lost. But this history cannot be undone. To preserve our position, we would have needed to be ruthlessly protectionist in the 1950s and 1960s: a policy that deliberately aimed to restrain the economic progress of Europe and Japan. But this would have been unwise, and even Buchanan does not contend otherwise. To long for our superiority of the 1940s is an exercise in nostalgia. Still, what is not true, then or now, is that trade impoverishes us. It is not depressing our living standards. It is elevating them. Trade may enable poorer nations to catch up, or to grow faster than we do; but this does not cause us to slow down. It is not a zero-sum game. We gain, too.
North-South disparity is the primary impetus for nuclear proliferation and terrorism Bernard Lown, MD Co-Founder, IPPNW, 1996, http://www.ippnw.org/, Crude Nuclear Weapons Proliferation
and the Terrorist Threat Nuclear apartheid cannot endure. The stimulus to proliferation derives largely from an inequitable world order and the growing economic divide between rich and poor countries. One fifth of the world lives on the edge of subsistence. At a time of potential abundance, more people are hungry than ever before. We end the century with far more desperately poor, illiterate, homeless, starving, and sick than we began. Nowhere are the inequities more in evidence than in the health sector. Eight hundred million people are without any health care at all. One-third of the worlds population lives in countries whose health care expenditures are far less than $12 per person per year (the bare minimum recommended by the World Bank) while the industrialized North spends more than $1,000 for health per person annually. Recent UN figures indicate that from 1960 to 1990, per capita income rose eight-fold in the North while increasing only half as much in the deprived lands of the South. This divide is likely to widen further while accelerating over-consumption in the North and burgeoning population pressures in the developing countries. As vital raw materials, scarce minerals, fossil fuels, and especially water become depleted, Northern affluence will be sustained by imposed belt tightening of impoverished multitudes struggling for mere subsistence. This is an agenda for endless conflict and colossal violence. The global pressure cooker will further superheat by the ongoing worldwide information revolution that exposes everyone to the promissory note of unlimited consumption, there by instilling impatience and igniting more embers of social upheaval. If desperation grows, the deprived will be tempted to challenge the affluent in the only conceivable way that can make an impact, namely by going nuclear. Their possession enables the weak to inflict unacceptable damage on the strong. Desperation and hopelessness breed religious fundamentalism and provide endless recruits ready to wreak vengeance, if necessary by self immolation in the process of inflicting unspeakable violence on others. A nuclear bomb affords the cheapest and biggest bang for the buck. No blackmail is as compelling as holding an entire city hostage. No other destructive device can cause greater societal disruption or exact a larger human toll. Terrorists will soon raise their sights to vaporizing a metropolitan area rather than merely pulverizing a building.
GDI Scholars
North/South
Globalization brings the South closer to the North Jim Chen, Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, Fordham International Law Journal, November / December, 2000, 24 Fordham Int'l L.J. 217
John Rawls's difference principle poses one final obstacle. Pax mercatoria is legitimate only if it advances the welfare of society's least advantaged class. Free trade may promote freedom and environmental quality in a country justly described as "the Michael Jordan of geopolitics," but what does it promise beyond the shores of the United States? Far from undermining the legitimacy of pax mercatoria, a look at the developing world and at formerly Communist countries confirms the metaphysical benefits of international economic coordination for nations rich and poor. Although the exact relationship between political freedom and economic growth remains ambiguous, certain constants have emerged since Bretton Woods. Chief among these is the recognition that neither wealth nor liberty can flourish unless private parties can realistically expect that courts will decide cases according to reasoned law and free of interference from the political branches of government. Rule of law, taken for granted in the United States and its peer nations, remains the sine qua non for development. Perhaps no element of rule of law is as critical as an independent judiciary. Corrupt or politically captive judiciaries impair development. The kleptocracies that have arisen in the former Soviet Union demonstrate all too clearly how corruption in judicial administration and law enforcement can stunt growth and freedom. By contrast, the restoration of Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997 has not drained the wealth from the former Crown Colony. The difference lies in the Chinese government's respect for the independence of Hong Kong's judiciary, however fitfully and grudgingly China honors that pledge. On balance, increases in wealth do enhance human rights. Economically vibrant societies tend to adopt and maintain beneficent laws and legal institutions. Cheaper, easier communication empowers the heretofore oppressed and dispossessed. Through these channels globalization achieves its indirect but positive impact on political freedom. "Globalization is not only the creation of world markets and transnational companies; it also means the extension of justice and democratic values into regions where barbarism still flourishes."
Free trade fosters development and prosperity in poor countries Denise Froning, former Trade Policy Analyst in the Center for International Trade and Economics at Heritage, August 25, 2000, The Benefits of Free Trade: A Guide For Policymakers
http://www.heritage.org/Research/TradeandForeignAid/BG1391.cfm, accessed 8/24/03 International trade is the framework upon which American prosperity rests. Free trade policies have created a level of competition in today's open market that engenders continual innovation and leads to better products, better-paying jobs, new markets, and increased savings and investment. Free trade enables more goods and services to reach American consumers at lower prices, thereby substantially increasing their standard of living. Moreover, the benefits of free trade extend well beyond American households. Free trade helps to spread the value of freedom, reinforce the rule of law, and foster economic development in poor countries. The national debate over trade-related issues too often ignores these important benefits.
Free trade puts money into North and South economies London Business School Economic Outlook Feb 1998
There are a number of important policy implications arising from our research. First and foremost we have provided theoretical underpinnings that support policies aimed at increased economic integration of the world economy. In particular, we have established two mechanisms by which openness increases growth and welfare for both the North and South. The first is through specialization and trade, which sees the North devoting more resources to innovation R&D research. The second is through knowledge spillovers which enable the South to progress into higher phases of development. When the South starts to innovate this results in world growth increasing further. In our model, and others of this genre, knowledge capital is a public good. It follows that the level of private investment in R&D, which adds to the stock of knowledge of capital and drives growth, is socially sub-optimal. There is therefore a role for governments to provide public support for R&D.
GDI Scholars
Poverty/development
Free trade boosts the economy, ending poverty Johan Norberg, Frontier Centre for Public Policy, The Benefits of Globalization, A Speech to the Frontier Centre, April 28, 2003, http://www.fcpp.org/publication_detail.php?PubID=575, accessed 8/23/03
The West grew rich in the 19th and 20th century because people here had the rule of law, property rights, the freedom to start a business and the freedom to trade. And because we had a free market, people and companies had to think of new and better ideas, and get more efficient in what they did otherwise consumers would turn to someone else. The market encourages and rewards long term investments in ever better production. This is what happened in Sweden. Even if you had levelled out all property in the middle of the 19th century, it would still have given everybody a life in poverty, of the levels of todays Mozambique. Instead, Sweden was saved by liberalisation. In a few decades, a couple of classical liberal politicans gave Sweden religious liberty, freedom of speech, and economic liberty, so that people could start their own business and buy and sell freely on the market. Free trade made it possible for Sweden to specialise in what we did best, such as the timber and iron industries, and exchange it for that which we produced less well, such as food and machinery. This specialisation and the competition that comes with it is still today the rationale for free trade. The increased production gave Swedes the possibility to feed themselves. It gave us economic growth and made it possible to increase well-being and invest in education and health care.
Globalization boosts all economies, ending poverty Johan Norberg, Frontier Centre for Public Policy, The Benefits of Globalization, A Speech to the Frontier Centre, April 28, 2003, http://www.fcpp.org/publication_detail.php?PubID=575, accessed 8/23/03
I have made up my mind, I hate poverty, I dont hate wealth. I want the poor and starving to get chances and a decent life. If millionaires became billionaires in the process, thats not a problem. Therefore, I love globalisation, the process which is lifting the poor towards wealth. Because it spreads markets, technology and ideas to parts of the world where it didnt exist before. Hard facts shows that it works. As UNDP has noted, during the last 50 years, global poverty has been reduced at a quicker pace than it had been in the 500 years before. In the last 30 years, the average income in developing countries has been doubled. In only the last two decades, the proportion in absolute poverty that is people with an income below $1/day has been reduced from 31 to about 20 per cent. During that time, world population has grown by 1,5 billion people, but we have still seen a reduction in the numbers of absolute poor, with about 200 million people. Never before in world history have we seen such a dramatic betting of the human condition. The world is not improving thanks to economic redistribution. Its improving thanks to economic growth. If we have 3 per cent growth per annum, this means that the economy, our capital and our incomes double every 23 years. If growth is twice as fast, these things double about every 12 years. This is an unparalleled growth of prosperity, compared with which even vigorous government measures for the redistribution of incomes take on a puny aspect. And not just puny, but downright dangerous, because high taxes to finance these measures can jeopardise growth. If so, great long-term benefits for everyone are sacrificed for small immediate gains for a few.
FREE TRADE INCREASES ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Denise H. Froning is Trade Policy Analyst in the Center for International Trade and Economics at The Heritage Foundation, 2001 (2001 (PRIORITIES FOR THE PRESIDENT,
http://www.heritage.org/mandate/priorities/chap14.html) An analysis of the economies of 161 countries published annually by The Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal in the Index of Economic Freedom demonstrates that free trade policies encourage development, raise the level of economic freedom, increase prosperity, and reinforce political freedoms.25 Every day in the marketplace of free countries, individuals are able to make choices and exercise direct control over their own lives. Establishing the backbone of the rule of law, with property rights and freemarket policies, is an essential step in creating the sort of market stability that foreign investors seek
GDI Scholars
Famine
Free trade ends food shortages, and keeps prices stable Indur M. Goklany, Julian Simon Fellow at the Political Economy Research Center, August 22, 2002,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa447.pdf, accessed 5/3/03 Because it is always possible to have local food shortages in the midst of a worldwide glut, the importance of trade should not be underestimated. Currently, grain imports amount to 10 percent of production in developing countries and 20 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa. Without such imports, food prices in those countries would no doubt be higher and more people would be priced out of the market. In essence, globalization, through trade, has enhanced food security. And in doing so it has reduced the severe health burdens that accompany hunger and undernourishment.
Blips in food prices kill billions Tampa Tribune, 1-20-96

On a global scale, food supplies - measured by stockpiles of grain - are not abundant. In 1995, world production failed to meet demand for the third consecutive year, said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. As a result, grain stockpiles fell from an average of 17 percent of annual consumption in 1994-1995 to 13 percent at the end of the 1995-1996 season, he said. That's troubling, Pinstrup-Andersen noted, since 13 percent is well below the 17 percent the United Nations considers essential to provide a margin of safety in world food security. During the food crisis of the early 1970s, world grain stocks were at 15 percent. "Even if they are merely blips, higher international prices can hurt poor countries that import a significant portion of their food," he said. "Rising prices can also quickly put food out of reach of the 1.1 billion people in the developing world who live on a dollar a day or less." He also said many people in low-income countries already spend more than half of their income on food.
Food shortages lead to World War III William Calvin, theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington, Atlantic Monthly, January, The Great Climate Flip-Flop, Vol 281, No. 1, 1998, p. 47-64
The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields would cause some powerful countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands -- if only because their armies, unpaid and lacking food, would go marauding, both at home and across the borders. The better-organized countries would attempt to use their armies, before they fell apart entirely, to take over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or starving their inhabitants if not using modern weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for the remaining food. This would be a worldwide problem -- and could lead to a Third World War -- but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. Present-day Europe has more than 650 million people. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic.
GDI Scholars
Famine
FREE MARKET POLICIES EMPIRICALLY INCREASE HUNGER AND POVERTY AROUND THE WORLD Food First, June 28, 2001, Myths of the Free Trade Area of the Americas Agreement,
http://www.foodfirst.org/progs/global/trade/ftaamyths.html Myth: Free trade can end hunger if governments will just get out of the way. Reality: Free market policies exacerbate hunger and poverty around the world. For example, Chile's free market experiment increased poverty from 17% to 45% from 1973 to 1990. In Mexico since NAFTA 8 million people dropped out the middle class into poverty. Government involvement is needed to allocate resources and distribute goods needed to ensure that the weakest citizens have the right to food and food producing resources.
TRADE LIBERALIZATION WILL INCREASE FOOD PRODUCTION AND REDUCE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS Wesley Nimon and Uptal Vasavada, Economic Research Service, USDA, Agricultural Trade Policies in the New Millennium, 2002, eds. Kennedy and Koo, p. 118
One study finds that multilateral trade liberalization will shift food production away from the developed countries toward LDCs that use more labor and less potentially polluting chemicals. This shift will not, however, price changes. Because of increased worldwide allocative efficiency, trade liberalization will increase income, which will further lessen environmental degradation from farming (Anderson, 1992).
TRADE LIBERALIZATION WILL INCREASE AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION WITH LITTLE IMPACT ON THE ENVIRONMENT Wesley Nimon and Uptal Vasavada, Economic Research Service, USDA, Agricultural Trade Policies in the New Millennium, 2002, eds. Kennedy and Koo, p. 118
A more recent OECD study indicates that trade liberalization would cause agricultural prices and production intensity to decrease in those countries that have historically had chemical-intensive production practices. In those countries where pesticide and fertilizer usage has been historically low, and hence better able to accommodate increased agricultural intensity, there would be increased application rates. Corroborating Andersons earlier work this study concludes that trade liberalization will only have modest impacts on agricultural land use. Although the effect is projected to be small, increases in the total ruminant livestock herd might lead to some increases in greenhouse gas emissions (OECD, 2000).
GDI Scholars
South Asia
Free trade ends South Asian conflict Keith Brown, Department of Economics at Texas A&M, Free Trade and Foreign Policy, 1999,
http://www.independent.org/tii/students/GarveyEssay99Brown.html, accessed 9/1/03 India also makes good subject matter for another reason: they and Pakistan hate each other, and both have nuclear weapons. As the prospect of an arms race on the Subcontinent looms, we are left to ask the question "what if they had free trade?" Perhaps the most important contribution of free trade to peace is its fostering of direct ties between individuals of different nations and cultures, which would clearly benefit the citizenry of India and Pakistan. If the mostly Hindu Indians and mostly Muslim Pakistanis traded more with each other, they would foster closer ties based initially on commerce. Hatred would become far less profitable, and the prospect of peace would be far more realistic.
South Asian conflict would ensure nuclear winter Ghulam Nabi Fai, Kashmiri American Council, July 8, 2001, Washington Times
The foreign policy of the United States in South Asia should move from the lackadaisical and distant (with India crowned with a unilateral veto power) to aggressive involvement at the vortex. The most dangerous place on the planet is Kashmir, a disputed territory convulsed and illegally occupied for more than 53 years and sandwiched between nuclear-capable India and Pakistan. It has ignited two wars between the estranged South Asian rivals in 1948 and 1965, and a third could trigger nuclear volleys and a nuclear winter threatening the entire globe. The United States would enjoy no sanctuary. This apocalyptic vision is no idiosyncratic view. The director of central intelligence, the Defense Department, and world experts generally place Kashmir at the peak of their nuclear worries. Both India and Pakistan are racing like thoroughbreds to bolster their nuclear arsenals and advanced delivery vehicles. Their defense budgets are climbing despite widespread misery amongst their populations. Neither country has initialed the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or indicated an inclination to ratify an impending Fissile Material/Cut-off Convention.
GDI Scholars
Environment
Globalization destroys the localism that is at the core of all environmental problems Jim Chen, Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, Fordham International Law Journal, November / December, 2000, 24 Fordham Int'l L.J. 217
Freedom to travel also has an environmental dimension. Aggressive environmental protection safeguards the freedom of movement by severing decisions to travel or to move from variations in environmental quality. The same Commerce Clause that protects trade among the states enables Congress to address environmental problems that affect multiple states or otherwise impair the movement of goods and persons in interstate commerce. This connection becomes all the more critical in an era of unprecedented constitutional pressure on federal environmental law. Civil liberties of the first order wither when the ordinary citizen "must be afraid to drink freely from his [or her] country's rivers and streams." In this sense, official complicity in environmental degradation violates the international human rights norm against "arbitrary ... exile." "Across-the-board globalism" is the best way of coordinating free trade and environmental protection as "complementary" policies. Admittedly, simultaneously advocating free trade and environmental integrity typically earns a deluxe suite at the "very small hotel" that will be hosting the next "global convention of rabid free trade environmentalists." Yet this jarring juxtaposition is unavoidable in a world of falling frontiers. The creation of "transboundary communities" causes "environmental interconnection" and in turn the "inevitable" abandonment of "localism in all spheres." Strictly localist solutions will not suffice; "haphazard local encouragement" cannot replace coordinated responses to "diffuse, cross-jurisdictional" problems such as mobile source emissions and nonpoint-source runoff. Environmental integrity as a human right, so central in the localist critique of globalization, is more effectively advanced by free trade than by protectionism. In the absence of clearly defined, consistently enforced trade rules, "environmental standards" rapidly become "especially attractive candidates for disguised protectionism." Standards as vague as multifunctionality or sustainability are "far more susceptible to political capture" than specific and transparent environmental measures. Perhaps no controversy depicts this dynamic as vividly as the transatlantic tussle over beef from hormone-fed cattle. One attractive alternative to parochial, intrinsically protectionist measures lies in the adoption of uniform global standards. That project, however, presumes a continued commitment to integration rather than isolation in matters affecting the global economy and the global environment.
GDI Scholars
Democracy
Globalization strengthens democratic values Jim Chen, Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, Fordham International Law Journal, November / December, 2000, 24 Fordham Int'l L.J. 217
Globalization advances democracy not only by raising overall wealth, but also by improving the political climate within nations. The ability of multinational corporations and skilled workers to adopt "fight or flight" strategies encourages governments to adopt transparent policies and to broaden political participation. Businesses and nongovernmental organizations respond by cooperating with the government to form "transnational epistemic communities." Even where they are despised as scourges against local businesses, multinational corporations introduce moral values in countries that have yet to realize globalization's full benefits. At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, even as unstable governments plunge into kleptocracy and anti-Western terrorists flourish, nongovernmental organizations have stepped into the resulting power vacuum in order to help police the morals of globalized society.
Global democratic consolidation is essential to prevent many scenarios for war and extinction. Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, October 1995, Promoting Democracy in
the 1990s, http://www.carnegie.org//sub/pubs/deadly/dia95_01.html, accessed on 12/11/99 OTHER THREATS This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.
GDI Scholars
Terrorism
Free trade addresses terrorism at its root Brink Lindsey, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at Cato, Free Trade and Our National Security, December 5, 2001, http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/articles/bl-12-5-01.html, accessed 8/24/03
President Kennedy was no less forceful in linking free trade and national security. World trade is more than ever essential to world peace, stated the 1960 Democratic Party platform. We therefore must resist the temptation to accept remedies that deny American producers and consumers access to world markets and destroy the prosperity of our friends in the noncommunist world. Kennedy put those words into action with his 1962 Trade Expansion Act, which made possible the breakthrough Kennedy Round of world trade talks. He praised the legislation as an important new weapon to advance the cause of freedom, since a vital expanding economy in the free world is a strong counter to the threat of the world communist movement. In the wake of September 11, the national security dimension of trade policy is once again plainly visible. It is now painfully clear that Americans live in a dangerous worldand that the primary danger at present emanates from the economic and political failures of the Muslim world. Those failures breed the despair on which violent Islamic extremism feeds; no comprehensive campaign against terrorism can leave them unaddressed. Market opening in the Muslim world is desperately needed. Trade and investment barriers are pervasive, and exports other than oil remain puny. Its true that scrapping protectionist policies, by itself, will not guarantee economic revitalization. But the fact is that integration into the larger world economy has been central to every developing-country success story of recent times. Exposing the economy to foreign competition and capital acts as a catalyst for more systemic reforms. And over the longer term, such far-flung examples as Chile, Mexico, Taiwan, and South Korea demonstrate the interconnectedness of globalization, economic dynamism, and eventual democratization.
Biological terrorist attack would spread and eradicate the population of the entire world John Steinbruner, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, chair of the committee on international security and arms control of the National Academy of Sciences, Foreign Policy, December 22, 1997
That deceptively simple observation has immense implications. The use of a manufactured weapon is a singular event. Most of the damage occurs immediately. The aftereffects, whatever they may be, decay rapidly over time and distance in a reasonably predictable manner. Even before a nuclear warhead is detonated, for instance, it is possible to estimate the extent of the subsequent damage and the likely level of radioactive fallout. Such predictability is an essential component for tactical military planning. The use of a pathogen, by contrast, is an extended process whose scope and timing cannot be precisely controlled. For most potential biological agents, the predominant drawback is that they would not act swiftly or decisively enough to be an effective weapon. But for a few pathogens - ones most likely to have a decisive effect and therefore the ones most likely to be contemplated for deliberately hostile use - the risk runs in the other direction. A lethal pathogen that could efficiently spread from one victim to another would be capable of initiating an intensifying cascade of disease that might ultimately threaten the entire world population. The 1918 influenza epidemic demonstrated the potential for a global contagion of this sort but not necessarily its outer limit.
GDI Scholars
Terrorism
FREE TRADE REDUCES TERRORISM The Washington Post, December 5, 2001, Bolivian President Says Free Trade is Best Answer to
Terrorism, http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~delacova/bolivia/bolivia-quiroga.htm "The fight for freedom and the fight against terrorism has two facets," he said. "Terrorists target not only our freedom of democracy but also freedom of trade. . . . The more products, the more freedom of trade, the more globalization, the better." The president said a new inter-American agreement on terrorism is being drafted by the Organization of American States and will be ready in two to three months.
EXPANDING TRADE WITH MUSLIM NATIONS WILL REDUCE TERRORISM Brink Lindsey & Dan Ikenson, Cato Institute, August 5, 2003, Trade Policy Analysis No. 24, The Trade
Front: Combating terrorism with open markets, http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/pas/tpa-024es.html In May 2003 President Bush announced plans to create a U.S.-Middle East free-trade area within a decade. The new trade initiative aims to combat terrorism, and the Islamist extremism that underlies it, by promoting economic and political development in the Muslim world. The administration moved quickly to begin putting its plans into action by announcing that the United States and Bahrain would soon commence negotiations for a free-trade agreement (FTA). Meanwhile, negotiations for an FTA with Morocco are already under way, and a U.S.-Jordan FTA, now in its second year, has produced a boom in Jordanian exports. The Bush administration should be congratulated for opening a trade front in the war on terrorism. With the proper commitment and follow-through, a major U.S. trade initiative in the Muslim world can give real encouragement to desperately needed growth and reform in that troubled region.
EXPANDED TRADE WITH MUSLIM COUNTRIES WOULD REDUCE TERRORISM Christian Science Monitor, September 9, 2003, How trade impacts US jobs and the war on terrorism,
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0909/p02s02-usfp.html Lindsey argues that the connection is so evident that the US should consider granting duty-free market access to a list of Muslim countries. Winning the war on terrorism depends on cooperation from the countries where it breeds, these experts say, so the US will have to act in ways that make other countries want to make the fight theirs - and that's where trade policy comes in. "When it comes down to it, we're asking these countries to take steps to save our people's lives," says Carnegie's Perkovich. "To get that cooperation, it's only normal that they would expect us to do the things that they think will save their lives."
GLOBAL TRADE WILL REDUCE TERRORISM Ted G. Fishman, contributing editor of Harper's Magazine and a former currency trader. HARPER'S MAGAZINE, August 2002, p. 33
That global trade will defeat terror seems axiomatic. Where countries scuttle restrictive laws, allow people to launch businesses, and otherwise prepare for an ever freer world economy, peace will follow. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed up the thesis as the "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention," the mostly true observation that countries with McDonald's restaurants do not wage war against one another. "Let's not kid ourselves," Secretary of State Colin Powell explained last fall to a Washington audience that included representatives of several African nations. "Business is business, and capital, money, is a coward. It is drawn to places which have the rule of law, places where there is an accountability of government, educated healthy workforces, secure working conditions. Capital will flee--money will flee from corruption, bad policies. It will flee from conflict. It will flee from sickness."
GDI Scholars
Democracy
GLOBALIZATION THREATENS DEMOCRACY Chahine Ghais, Notre Dame University, 2001, Globalism and localism: changing our political understanding
of sovereignty and democracy, PALMA Research Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 1, http://www.ndu.edu.lb/academics/Palma/vol7is1a10.html Globalism and Localism influence state sovereignty at two opposing levels. They attract power and authority away from the state upwards to the international/global level through economic and ecological integration, while they detract state control downwards to the national and ethnic constituents. The state, especially in heterogeneous societies, is left in a very defensive position trying to maintain its basic role as the main organizer and protector of civility in human societies. Democracy is threatened by globalization due to the latters overwhelming forces of economic uniformity and cultural homogeneity that deprive the local peoples of their freedom of choice and sovereign participation in indigenous political institutions. Localism threatens democracy through its continuous intercommunal conflicts, minority oppression, and genocide. While recognizing that developing societies are affected more negatively than advanced societies by globalism and localism, the paper concludes that states remain, for the foreseeable future, the only viable organization capable of providing peace and democracy.
FREE TRADE PROMOTES DEMOCRACY Denise H. Froning is Trade Policy Analyst in the Center for International Trade and Economics at The Heritage Foundation, 2001 (2001 (PRIORITIES FOR THE PRESIDENT,
http://www.heritage.org/mandate/priorities/chap14.html) Free trade both fosters and is reinforced by the rule of law, and removes incentives for corruption. It also transmits ideas and values, advancing a culture of freedom that can become both the cornerstone and capstone of economic prosperity. Consider Taiwan's success in achieving economic--and thence political-freedom. It clearly suggests that if China opens its market, economic and political freedoms will have a real chance to develop on the mainland as well. The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has been one of the world's fastest growing economies--in the 1990s, its growth rate was a stunning 11 percent. In the years following its establishment in 1949, the ROC had an inefficient and overregulated economy. In the late 1960s, however, the government began to institute reforms. It guaranteed private property and set up a legal system to protect it, reformed the banking and financial sectors, stabilized taxes, gave public lands to private individuals, and allowed the free market to expand. These policies launched Taiwan, one of Asia's famous "tigers," into the industrialized world.
GDI Scholars
Democracy
Free trade demolishes tyranny and the accompanying civil conflicts that kill millions Jason Brooks, Department of Journalism at Carleton University, 1999 ed. Independent Institute Make Trade, Not
War http://www.independent.org/tii/students/GarveyEssay99Brooks.html We now turn to another powerful benefit of trade: how it undermines tyranny. Undermining tyranny is important for two reasons. First, as mentioned, democracies are less likely than autocracies to make international violence. Second, and perhaps more important, weakening autocratic governments fosters peace within countries by protecting citizens from the violence of their own governments. While international war is horrific, deadlier still are conflicts inside the borders of nations. And deadliest of all are the prolonged, often covered-up wars waged by governments against their own citizens. When considering how free trade brings peace, it is important to focus not just on how it prevents international violence but also how it prevents domestic slaughter. To give an idea how the body counts stacks up, Rudolph Rummel offers some statistics. From 1900 to 1987, the war dead in the world from civil and international conflicts totaled 38,500,000. This giant figure is dwarfed, however, when we look at the mass murder committed by governments on their own people: at least 169 million killed, by Rummel's count, in the first 87 years of the 20th century. This includes the approximately 21 million people murdered by the government of Nazi Germany and the 55 million of its own citizens the Soviet government killed. Many other governments, including China, Cambodia and Japan have murdered millions or hundreds of thousands. Free trade helps to foster peace by transferring power away from governments into the hands of citizens. Free trade is closely linked with a number of other personal freedoms, including the right to hold private property, that are prerequisites for democracy. How does free trade empower people? Free trade -- either at home or abroad -largely implies that people can do what they want. They may coordinate and interact with whom they choose, they may buy what they can afford and sell what is theirs. Control gained by citizens over their own actions is, by corollary, control lost by government. In a pure state of free trade, people may migrate freely between nations. It is not for nothing that totalitarian countries build walls to keep their citizens from leaving and erect barriers to trade. If trade had been free, citizens of the former Soviet Union could have simply left. Millions would have enjoyed more prosperous lives elsewhere; millions would have escaped the slaughter of the totalitarian state. Under open borders, the Soviet government would have had to tailor is policies to appeal to the masses or else run out of people to govern due to mass emigration.
Free trade encourages democracy Jason Brooks, Department of Journalism at Carleton University, 1999 ed. Independent Institute Make Trade, Not
War http://www.independent.org/tii/students/GarveyEssay99Brooks.html A free trade in ideas lets citizens import cultural products of their choice, including movies, books and other literature that weakens tyranny by spreading messages of democracy and freedom. Free trade on an internal scale allows citizens to circulate these materials amongst themselves and organize their labor into activities that promote democracy. While free trade, or an even wider definition of capitalism, doesn't guarantee democracy, trade is closely linked to democracy. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman writes that "I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of its economic activity." Free trade and democracy are, it seems, on a continuum and they move together. Any amount of free trade detracts from the power of the government and increases the power of common citizens. The greater the extent of this power shift, the greater a country moves from tyranny to a state of democracy, a state that is most friendly to peace at home and abroad.
GDI Scholars
Heg
Free trade secures US hard power Dr. Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr., former Director of, and Sarah Fitzgerald, Trade Policy Analyst in, the Center for International Trade and Economics at Heritage, December 18, 2002, Trade Promotes Prosperity and Security
http://www.heritage.org/Research/TradeandForeignAid/BG1617.cfm, accessed 8/24/03 It is fitting that economic freedom be included as part of the national security strategy. A strong economy undergirds a strong national defense, and the strong U.S. economy is one source of the military strength of the United States. The national security strategy also argues, however, that the economic strength of other friendly countries will enhance U.S. security. Economic freedom sustains economic growth and wealth creation. Free markets foster the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation that creates new products and jobs. This creative economic process in turn generates higher incomes, savings and wealth creation, and economic development in nations.According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, for instance, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay Round together "generate annual benefits of $1,300$2,000 for the average American family of four."8 Such benefits equal more than $100 per month and would greatly assist struggling families throughout the world. According to a World Bank study, "growth generally does benefit the poor as much as everyone else, so that the growth-enhancing policies of good rule of law, fiscal discipline, and openness to international trade should be at the center of successful poverty reduction strategies." Chapter VI of the Administration's national security strategy describes the process succinctly: "Ignite a New Era of Global Economic Growth Through Free Markets and Free Trade." Specifically: A strong world economy enhances our national security by advancing prosperity and freedom in the rest of the world. Economic growth supported by free trade and free markets creates new jobs and higher incomes. It allows people to lift their lives out of poverty, spurs economic and legal reform, and the fight against corruption, and it reinforces the habits of liberty.
US leadership prevents global nuclear exchange Zalmay Khalilzad, RAND, Washington Quarterly, Spring, 1995
Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system.
GDI Scholars
Racism
Protectionism is racist Denver Post, November 17, 1997
But when it comes to the free trade debate, the intellectual case for protectionism was destroyed more than a century ago by economist David Ricardo's "law of comparative advantage." Let's assume a simple economy in which I grow apples while you grow oranges. If you're as tired of your orange juice as I am of my apple pies, we can both live better if I swap some of my excess apples for your surplus oranges. The protectionist argues that this trade is OK if we both live in the same country. But put a fence between our properties and call you, say, "Mexico," and the protectionist will claim I should cut down some of my apple orchards and convert them into orange groves to be "self-sufficient" and avoid giving U.S. dollars to foreigners. Of course, those dollars are just pieces of paper that are worthless unless they eventually return to this country to buy U.S. goods and services, thereby bringing back the jobs that were supposedly "exported" in the original trade.But remember, protectionists insist that a voluntary transaction that is salutary if performed with an American becomes evil if your partner is a Mexican. Thus, protectionism is inherently racist or chauvinistic. And like other forms of racism, protectionism isn't just morally odious, it's economically inefficient. Here's why: Let's say I can grow 100 apples on my plot of Colorado land, but only 10 oranges. Your Mexican land is so productive you could grow 200 oranges or 120 apples. You're more efficient than I am at growing both crops, so why would you trade with me? Well, if we split our respective lands to be "self-sufficient, I grow 50 apples and 5 oranges. You have 100 oranges and 60 apples. But if we each specialize in what we do best, I'll raise 100 apples and you'll grow 200 oranges. Swap 50 of your oranges for 50 of my apples and you end up with 200 mixed fruit while I have 100. Obviously, you're still richer than I am, but we're both better off because we traded.
GDI Scholars
Environment
Environmental problems are global and require global cooperation Jim Chen, Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, Fordham International Law Journal, November / December, 2000, 24 Fordham Int'l L.J. 217
The most serious environmental problems involve "the depletion and destruction of the global commons." Climate change, ozone depletion, and the loss of species, habitats, and biodiversity are today's top environmental priorities. None can be solved without substantial economic development and intense international cooperation. The systematic degradation of the biosphere respects no political boundaries. Worse, it is exacerbated by poverty. Of the myriad environmental problems in this mutually dependent world, "persistent poverty may turn out to be the most aggravating and destructive." We must remember "above all else" that "human degradation and deprivation ... constitute the greatest threat not only to national, regional, and world security, but to essential life-supporting ecological systems."
Open markets result in more sustainable environments statistics prove Ana Eiras, Economic Policy Analyst for Latin America, and Brett Schaefer, Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs in the Center for International Trade and Economics at Heritage, September 27 2001, Trade: The Best Way
to Protect the Environment, http://www.heritage.org/Research/TradeandForeignAid/BG1480.cfm, accessed 8/24/03 Moreover, the United States is an example of the elasticity of spending for environmental protection. As incomes have risen over the past three decades, America has increased "real spending by government and business on the environment and natural resource protection has doubled." 6 Economically free countries typically have a more sustainable environmental policy. In January 2001, the World Economic Forum, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy published an Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI). 7 The Index assigns the health of a country's environment a single number ranging from 0 to 100, in which zero means low sustainability and 100 means high sustainability. This number represents a country's success in coping with environmental challenges and cooperating with other countries in the management and improvement of common environmental problems. Chart 1 illustrates the relationship between The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal 2001 Index of Economic Freedom scores and the ESI. The chart shows a strong relationship between economic freedom and environmental sustainability. The freer the economy, the greater the level of environmental sustainability. The United States is a classic example of economic freedom's beneficial impact on the environment. America has been a champion of economic freedom for decades while simultaneously maintaining one of the world's cleanest environments. Countries with more open trade and investment policies generally have higher levels of environmental sustainability. Free trade and the investment that typically follows it are two important sources of economic growth. Therefore, an open trade policy and a business-friendly environment will not only increase growth, but also provide the means to protect the environment. The Heritage Foundation calculated a "Trade Openness Index" based on the 2001 Index of Economic Freedom by averaging the score for the trade policy, property rights, capital flows and foreign investment, and regulation factors. Consider the relationship between the Trade Openness Index and the Environmental Sustainability Index illustrated in Chart 2. In countries with an open economy, the average environmental sustainability score is more than 30 percent higher than the scores of countries with moderately open economies, and almost twice as high as those of countries with closed economies.
GDI Scholars
A2: Culture
Culture is deployed as an excuse for genocide David Rothkopf, managing director of Kissinger Associates and adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia, Foreign Policy, June 22, 1997
Finally, as a reminder of the toll that such conflicts take, one need only look at the 20th century's genocides. In each one, leaders used culture to fuel the passions of their armies and other minions and to justify their actions among their people. One million Armenians; tens of millions of Russians; 10 million Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals; 3 million Cambodians; and hundreds of thousands of Bosnians, Rwandans, and Timorese all were the victims of "culture" - whether it was ethnic, religious, ideological, tribal, or nationalistic in its origins. To be sure, they fell victim to other agendas as well. But the provocative elements of culture were to these accompanying agendas as Joseph Goebbels was to Adolf Hitler - an enabler and perhaps the most insidious accomplice. Historians can, of course, find examples from across the ages of "superior" cultures eradicating "inferior" opponents - in the American West, among the native tribes of the Americas and Africa, during the Inquisition, and during the expansion of virtually every empire.
Culture produces conflict David Rothkopf, managing director of Kissinger Associates and adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia, Foreign Policy, June 22, 1997
Culture is not static; it grows out of a systematically encouraged reverence for selected customs and habits. Indeed, Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines culture as the "total pattern of human behavior and its products embodied in speech, action, and artifacts and dependent upon man's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations." Language, religion, political and legal systems, and social customs are the legacies of victors and marketers and reflect the judgment of the marketplace of ideas throughout popular history. They might also rightly be seen as living artifacts, bits and pieces carried forward through the years on currents of indoctrination, popular acceptance, and unthinking adherence to old ways. Culture is used by the organizers of society - politicians, theologians, academics, and families - to impose and ensure order, the rudiments of which change over time as need dictates. It is less often acknowledged as the means of justifying inhumanity and warfare. Nonetheless, even a casual examination of the history of conflict explains well why Samuel Huntington, in his The Clash of Civilizations, expects conflict along cultural fault lines, which is precisely where conflict so often erupts. Even worse is that cultural differences are often sanctified by their links to the mystical roots of culture, be they spiritual or historical. Consequently, a threat to one's culture becomes a threat to one's God or one's ancestors and, therefore, to one's core identity. This inflammatory formula has been used to justify many of humanity's worst acts.
Homogenization doesnt strip difference it eliminates the dangerous effects of culture David Rothkopf, managing director of Kissinger Associates and adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia, Foreign Policy, June 22, 1997
Critics of globalization argue that the process will lead to a stripping away of identity and a blandly uniform, Orwellian world. On a planet of 6 billion people, this is, of course, an impossibility. More importantly, the decline of cultural distinctions may be a measure of the progress of civilization, a tangible sign of enhanced communications and understanding. Successful multicultural societies, be they nations, federations, or other conglomerations of closely interrelated states, discern those aspects of culture that do not threaten union, stability, or prosperity (such as food, holidays, rituals, and music) and allow them to flourish. But they counteract or eradicate the more subversive elements of culture (exclusionary aspects of religion, language, and political/ideological beliefs). History shows that bridging cultural gaps successfully and serving as a home to diverse peoples requires certain social structures, laws, and institutions that transcend culture. Furthermore, the history of a number of ongoing experiments in multiculturalism, such as in the European Union, India, South Africa, and the United States, suggests that workable, if not perfected, integrative models exist. Each is built on the idea that tolerance is crucial to social well-being, and each at times has been threatened by both intolerance and a heightened emphasis on cultural distinctions. The greater public good warrants eliminating those cultural characteristics that promote conflict or prevent harmony, even as lessdivisive, more personally observed cultural distinctions are celebrated and preserved.
GDI Scholars
***FREE TRADE BAD
GDI Scholars
War
Trade interdependence causes war George Friedman, founder and chairman of Stratfor, and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War, 1996, p. 79 The argument that interdependence gives rise to peace is flawed in theory as well as in practice. Conflicts arise from friction, particularly friction involving the fundamental interests of different nations. The less interdependence there is, the fewer the areas of serious friction. The more interdependence there is, the greater the areas of friction, and, therefore, the greater the potential for conflict. Two widely separated nations that trade little with each other are unlikely to go to warBrazil is unlikely to fight Madagascar precisely because they have so little to do with each other. France and Germany, on the other hand, which have engaged in extensive trade and transnational finance, have fought three wars with each other over about seventy years. Interdependence was the root of the conflicts, not the deterrent.
There are, of course, cases of interdependence in which one country effectively absorbs the other or in which their interests match so precisely that the two countries simply merge. In other cases, interdependence remains peaceful because the economic, military, and political power of one country is overwhelming and inevitable. In relations between advanced industrialized countries and third-world countries, for example, this sort of asymmetrical relationship can frequently be seen. All such relationships have a quality of unease built into them, particularly when the level of interdependence is great. When one or both nations attempt, intentionally or unintentionally, to shift the balance of power, the result is often tremendous anxiety and, sometimes, real pain. Each side sees the others actions as an attempt to gain advantage and becomes frightened. In the end, precisely because the level of interdependence is so great, the relationship can, and frequently does, spiral out of control. Consider the
seemingly miraculous ability of the United States and Soviet Union to be rivals and yet avoid open warfare. These two powers could forgo extreme measures because they were not interdependent. Neither relied on the other for its economic well-being, and therefore, its social stability. This provided considerable room for maneuvering. Because there were few economic linkages, neither nation felt irresistible pressure to bring the relationship under control; neither felt any time constraint. Had one country been dependent on the other for something as important as oil or long-term investment, there would have been enormous fear of being held hostage economically. Each would have sought to dominate the relationship, and the result would have been catastrophic. In the years before World War I, as a result of European interdependence, control of key national issues fell into the hands of foreign governments. Thus, decisions made in Paris had tremendous impact on Austria, and decisions made in London determined growth rates in the Ruhr. Each government sought to take charge of its own destiny by shifting the pattern of interdependence in its favor. Where economic means proved insufficient, political and military strategies were tried.
Statistical analysis shows free trade increases the risk of war Katherine Barbieri, Department of Political Science, University of North Texas, February 1996, Journal of Peace
Research, p. 42-43 This study provides little empirical support for the liberal proposition that trade provides a path to interstate peace. Even after controlling for the influence of contiguity, joint democracy, alliance ties, and relative capabilities, the evidence suggests that in most instances trade fails to deter conflict. Instead, extensive economic interdependence increases the likelihood that dyads engage in militarized dispute; however, it appears to have little influence on the incidence of war. The greatest hope for peace appears to arise from symmetrical trading relationships. However, the dampening effect of symmetry is offset by the expansion of interstate linkages.
Free trade doesnt cause peace Christopher Layne, Naval Postgraduate School, World Policy Journal, Summer 1998, p. 8-28.
These arguments notwithstanding, international economic interdependence does not cause peace. In fact, it has very serious adverse security consequences that its proponents either do not understand or will not acknowledge. Economic relations (whether domestic or international) never take place in a vacuum; on the contrary, they occur within a politically defined framework. International economic interdependence requires certain conditions in order to flourish, including a maximum degree of political order and stability. Just as the market cannot function within a state unless the state creates a stable "security" environment in which economic exchange can occur (by protecting property rights and enforcing contracts), the same is true in international relations. Because there is no world government, it falls to the dominant state to create the conditions under which economic interdependence can take hold (by providing security, rules of the game, and a reserve currency, and by acting as the global economy's banker and lender of last resort). Without a dominant power to perform these tasks, economic interdependence does not happen. Indeed, free trade and interdependence have occurred in the modern international system only during the hegemonies of Victorian Britain and postwar America.
GDI Scholars
War
Globalization increases the risk of war Lieutenant Colonel Antulio Echevarria II, Director of Strategic Research at the Strategic Studies Institute, Globalization And The Nature Of War, Strategies Studies Institute, March, 2003,
http://www.mindfully.org/WTO/2003/Globalization-War-SSI%20Mar03.htm, accessed 8/23/03 Globalization is strengthening the role that politics will play in war by affording it the capability to exert greater real-time control over military operations. Globalization is also making the element of hostility more critical. Political leaders can now mobilize hostile passions more quickly and over a larger area than hitherto, particularly in areas suffering from the spread of globalization. Finally, contrary to expectation, the increase in information that globalization brings may well intensify the play of chance and probability in war.
Democracy spread by globalization fails to ensure peace. Countries are not stable Lieutenant Colonel Antulio Echevarria II, Director of Strategic Research at the Strategic Studies Institute, Globalization And The Nature Of War, Strategies Studies Institute, March, 2003,
http://www.mindfully.org/WTO/2003/Globalization-War-SSI%20Mar03.htm, accessed 8/23/03 The associated spread of democratic ideas and free market values helped increase the total number of democracies in the world by 14 percent within the last decade alone. Furthermore, considerable evidence suggests that globalization is making national and regional economies more interdependent, thereby giving rise to an integrated world market economy. Clearly, then, globalization is changing how we interact with our world. What is not yet clear, however, are the impacts of these trends. While the world may indeed have more democracies than ever before, how many of them have stable regimes with established civil societies where strong traditions exist conforming to the rule of law? As the example of Weimar Germany shows, newly formed democracies can rapidly reverse course and transform into dangerous autocratic regimes. While there is some validity to the view that established democracies do not go to war with other democracies, the number of established democracies is relatively small. Also, while globalization has improved general wealth, raised living standards, and increased life expectancy across the world, 60 percent of the worlds wealth continues to travel back and forth among the developed countries, giving them the greater share of benefits. The poor may be richer, but the rich are richer still; and the gap between them is growing. What is more, as the First and Second World Wars demonstrate, economic interconnectedness and continuous growth do not necessarily preclude conflict.
Globalization decreases international stability Lieutenant Colonel Antulio Echevarria II, Director of Strategic Research at the Strategic Studies Institute, Globalization And The Nature Of War, Strategies Studies Institute, March, 2003,
http://www.mindfully.org/WTO/2003/Globalization-War-SSI%20Mar03.htm, accessed 8/23/03 Despite its apparent positive impact on the spread of democracy and free-market economies, globalization might produce a more dangerous and unpredictable world, especially if the cultural backlash it has generated thus far gathers more momentum. This world might be characterized by shifting power relationships, ad hoc security arrangements, and an ever-widening gap between the richest and poorest nations. A number of new democracieslacking strong traditions for maintaining checks and balancesmight, for example, collapse after only transitory successes. Transnational threats, such as international crime syndicates, terrorist networks, and drug cartels, could continue to grow in strength and influence, thriving among autocratic, weak, or so-called failed states. And, ethnic rivalries, nationalism, religiousbased antagonisms, and competition for scarce resources, including water, could go unresolved. Thus, serious crises would undoubtedly arise, especially as the worlds population continues to grow.
GDI Scholars
A2: Free trade solves war

Economic interdependence doesnt stop conflict Christopher Gelpi, Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University and Joseph M. Grieco, Professor of Political Science Duke University, June 27, 2001, Economic Interdependence, the Democratic State, and the
Liberal Peace, http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/bpollins/book/Gelpi&Grieco.pdf At the same time, Katherine Barbieri (1996, 1998) suggested that Oneal and Russett had erred in following a rule in constructing their data set whereby they attributed zero bilateral trade to pairs of countries if neither had reported trade to the International Monetary Fund. Barbieri constructed a revised data set that supplemented IMF figures for bilateral trade with information from alternative sources. If no data could be found, she recorded the trade data as missing effectively eliminating the case from her analysis rather than attributing a level of zero trade for that dyad. With her revised data set, Barbieri found that growing economic interdependence did not appear to dampen the likelihood of militarized conflict and might even exacerbate it. Thus, at the end of the decade, the question of the direct effect of economic interdependence on world peace remained unresolved and highly contested.
Economic interdependence only prevents war in democratic states Christopher Gelpi, Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University and Joseph M. Grieco, Professor of Political Science Duke University, June 27, 2001, Economic Interdependence, the Democratic State, and the
Liberal Peace, http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/bpollins/book/Gelpi&Grieco.pdf Although debated for more than a century, international relations scholars still have not reached a consensus regarding the relationship between economic interdependence and military conflict. The current debate has focused primarily on methodological issues such as the use of pooled time-series data, the measurement of interdependence, and the treatment of missing data. These are obviously important issues that deserve careful scrutiny. We would contend, however, that the controversy over the influence of economic interdependence might be as much conceptual in origin as it is methodological. Specifically, we would suggest that the key to clarifying the relationship between interdependence and military conflict might lie in linking trade disruption and economic growth to the ability of national leaders to retain office. In the presence of democratic political structures, we expect that the resulting disruption of trade could materially undermine a leaders prospects for retaining office. Thus, in this context, interdependence should constrain militarized conflict. In the absence of democratic political constraints, however, the relationship between trade disruption and a leaders ability to retain office becomes attenuated. Thus, in this context we do not expect trade systematically to prevent militarized conflict.
GDI Scholars
Info-war
Globalization causes info-war Lieutenant Colonel Antulio Echevarria II, Director of Strategic Research at the Strategic Studies Institute, Globalization And The Nature Of War, Strategies Studies Institute, March, 2003,
http://www.mindfully.org/WTO/2003/Globalization-War-SSI%20Mar03.htm, accessed 8/23/03 Globalization has also introduced a new form of warfare: cyber-war. More than 30 countriesincluding Russia, China, and several so-called rogue stateshave developed or are developing the capability to launch strategic-level cyber attacks. The interconnectedness of many nations infrastructures means that a successful cyber attack against a single sector in one country could result in adverse effects in other sectors within the same country, or those of its neighbors. Indeed, intended (and unintended) adverse effects could well travel globally.
GDI Scholars
Environment
Free trade causes environmentally catastrophic resource extraction for export Tim Lang, Director of Parents for Safe Food and Colin Hines, coordinator of Greenpeace Internationals Economic Unit, 1993, The new protectionism, p. 62-63
The gearing of entire economies to increasing raw material exports for international trade also has its environmental impact at the point of extraction or production, especially in developing countries. Tropical timber is perhaps the best publicized case. Although the massive deforestation of the last decade has a range of causes, including clearing land for agriculture and grazing, mining, fuelwood gathering and trees felled for domestic use, the timber trade represents a significant proportion, about 50 per cent of the total production of industrial hardwood in tropical countries.8 The effect of timber trading on deforestation is larger than the mere numbers of trees cut down for export, since roads built for commercial logging bring in their wake farmers, miners and those seeking fuelwood. In 1991, this tropical timber industry was worth $6 billion, but it is beginning to decline as forests are decimated in one country after another to provide for the needs of Europe, Japan and North America. Thailand and the Philippines, which were once exporters, are now net inporters; Nigerias exports have slumped over the last decade and several other countries will soon be in the same position. At its most extreme, Sarawak, which along with Sabah provides more than 90 per cent of Japans tropical imports, is predicted by environmentalists to have no trees left for felling in five years time. This would be both an environmental disaster and a human tragedy, since it would destroy the homeland of the local Penan people, who are aggressively fighting this trend.9 The fate of timber in international trade is repeated with other commodities sold by the South. Developing countries exploit resources such as food, fish, minerals and energy for export mostly to repay debts, with often dire adverse environmental effects.
Environmental destruction leads to a global rash of interstate and civil wars Thomas Homer-Dixon, assistant professor of political science and director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Programme at the University of Toronto, 1998, World Security Challenges for a New Century, p. 342-343
Another possibility is that global environmental damage might increase the gap between rich and poor societies, with the poor then violently confronting the rich for a fairer share of the worlds wealth. Severe conflict may also arise from frustration with countries that do not go along with agreements to protect the global environment, or that free-ride by letting other countries absorb the costs of environmental protection. Warmer temperatures could lead to contention over more easily harvested resources in the Antarctic. Bulging populations and land stress may produce waves of environmental refugees, spilling across borders and disrupting relations among ethnic groups. Countries might fight among themselves because of dwindling supplies of water and the effects of upstream pollution.6 A sharp decline in food crop production and grazing land could lead to conflict between nomadic tribes and sedentary farmers. Environmental change could in time cause a slow deepening of poverty in poor countries, which might open bitter divisions between classes and ethnic groups, corrode democratic institutions, and spawn revolutions and insurgencies. In general, many experts have the sense that environmental problems will ratchet up the level of stress within states and the international community, increasing the likelihood of many different kinds of conflictfrom war and rebellion to trade disputesand undermining possibilities for cooperation.
Biodiversity decline causes extinction Richard Tobin, The Expendable Future, 1990, p. 22
Norman Meyers observes, no other form of environmental degradation is anywhere so significant as the fallout of species. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson is less modest in assessing the relative consequences of human-caused extinctions. To Wilson, the worst thing that will happen to earth is not economic collapse, the depletion of energy supplies, or even nuclear war. As frightful as these events might be, Wilson reasons that they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoingthat will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by destruction of natural habitats.
GDI Scholars
Environment
Free trade encourages global ecologically unsustainable growth Herman Daly, economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank, 1993, The Case Against Free Trade,
p. 129-130 Sustainable development means living within environmental constraints of absorptive and regenerative capacities. These constraints are both global (greenhouse effect, ozone shield), and local (soil erosion, deforestation). Trade between nations or regions offers a way of loosening local constraints by importing environmental services (including waste absorption) from elsewhere. Within limits this can be quite reasonable and justifiable. But carried to extremes in the name of free trade it becomes destructive. It leads to a situation in which each country is trying to live beyond its own absorptive and regenerative capacities by importing these capacities from elsewhere. Of course they pay for these capacities and all is well as long as other countries have made the complementary decision namely to keep their own scale well below their own national carrying capacity in order to export some of its services. In other words, the apparent escape from scale constraints enjoyed by some countries via trade depends on other countries willingness and ability to adopt the very discipline of limiting scale that the importing country is seeking to avoid. What nations have actually made this complementary choice? All countries now aim to grow in scale, and it is merely the fact that some have not yet reached their limits that allows other nations to import carrying capacity. Free trade does not remove carrying capacity constraintsit just guarantees that nations will hit that constraint more or less simultaneously rather than sequentially. It converts differing local constraints into an aggregated global constraint. It converts a set of problems, some of which are manageable, into one big unmanageable problem. Evidence that this is not understood is provided by the countless occasions when someone who really should know better points to The Netherlands or Hong Kong as both an example to be emulated, and as evidence that all countries could become as densely populated as these two. How it would be possible for all countries to be net exporters of goods and net importers of carrying capacity is not explained.
The transport of goods for free trade causes massive environmental destruction Tim Lang, Director of Parents for Safe Food and Colin Hines, coordinator of Greenpeace Internationals Economic Unit, 1993, The new protectionism, p. 61
The dramatic post-war increase in international trade means that more materials and goods are transported round the globe with a resulting increase in energy use and pollutants. The transport involved in international trade is estimated to account for one eighth of world oil consumption.1 The four billion tonnes of freight transported on ships in 1991 used up as much energy as was used by Brazil and Turkey combined, the equivalent to 4.2 billion 60 watt lightbulbs left on continously for a year. The 17 million tons of freight sent by plane used the equivalent of a year s energy consumption of the Philippines. Air freight is much more energy intensive it takes 47 times as much energy to carry a ton of goods a kilometre by air as it does by boat. To these figures have to be added the energy consumed in the road and rail transport of these internationally traded goods.2 Extending such trade will increase energy consumption unless there are fantastic leaps in energy saving transport. More global trade creates waste and pollution by the very act of transporting goods over greater distances. There are considerable differences in which kind and how much pollution different modes of transport cause.3 But if it is cost effective to keep bringing citrus fruits 10,000 miles from Latin America to Europe while Mediterannean countries dump fruit, there is something wrong with the costings system. The same problem arises within the European single market. Take croissants, for example. In a grocers shop in North London you can find, neatly packaged on the shelf, a box of croissants from Alicante, Spain. Across the road is a bakery which makes croissants on the premises. It may be profitable for the bakery in Alicante to mass produce croissants and ship them around 1,500 miles to the UK, but this is environmentally highly destructive. If we compared the energy that went into the two croissants, the one from Alicante would only make financial sense if the full cost of energy was not included. Transport fuelled by oil contributes to a wide range of environmental hazards local air pollution, international acid deposition and global warming, as well as depleting a non-renewable resource. So does it really make sense to transport identical goods around the world in the name of free trade?
GDI Scholars
Monocultures
Free trade causes monoculture David Frawley, Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, No Date, Western Monoculture and Indic Pluralism,
http://www.hssworld.org/homepage/html/boudhik/articles/vamadev1.html Monoculture does quite well with free trade and the spread of global consumerism, which is monoculture economics. Other economic systems are not allowed and are systematically undermined. The economic might of the monoculture levels any economic diversity, moving towards a single financial standard or currency worldwide. A uniform world economy destroys local economies and their rich diversity of expression and interactions based on an organic dependency. The rule of multinational businesses takes the place of local economies. Global corporate solutions are applied to local management issues, often with disastrous results. Corporate agriculture, the new agricultural monoculture, for example, is advertising its ability to feed the world and end world hunger, portraying itself in the benefic aspect of the church or a socialist government selflessly aiding the poor. What it is really doing is undermining the most basic of human rights, the right to feed oneself and to control ones food sources. What the global agribusiness envisions is control of the world food market, so that it can force entire countries to bow down before it, who cannot even eat without its favor. Among its tools are genetically engineered crops, including terminator seeds that destroy local plant varieties, fertilizers that weaken the soils and breed dependency, and patents on plants that afford corporate ownership to natures bounty. Meanwhile, those who oppose the global food business are deemed backwards, causing hunger and starvation in the world, as if apart from the agribusiness no one could feed themselves!
Extinction results without sustained genetic diversity Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney, Rural Advancement Fund International, Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, 1990, p. ix
While many may ponder the consequences of global warming, perhaps the biggest single environmental catastrophe in human history is unfolding in the garden. While all are rightly concerned about the possibility of nuclear war, an equally devastating time bomb is ticking away in the fields of farmers all over the world. Loss of genetic diversity in agriculturesilent, rapid, inexorableis leading us to a rendezvous with extinctionto the doorstep of hunger on a scale we refuse to imagine. To simplify the environment as we have done with agriculture is to destroy the complex interrelationships that hold the natural world together. Reducing the diversity of life, we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious. It is life at the end of the limb. That is the subject of this book. Agronomists in the Philippines warned of what became known as southern corn leaf blight in 1061.' The disease was reported in Mexico not long after. In the summer of 1968, the first faint hint that the blight was in the United States came from seed growers in the Midwest. The danger was ignored. By the spring of 1970 the disease had taken hold in the Florida corn crop. But it was not until corn prices leapt thirty cents a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade that the world took notice; by then it was Augustand too late. By the close of the year, Americans had lost fifteen percent of their most important cropmore than a billion bushels. Some southern states lost half their harvest and many of their farmers. While consumers suffered in the grocery stores, producers were out a billion dollars in lost yield. And the disaster was not solely domestic. U.S. seed exports may have spread the blight to Africa, Latin America and Asia.
GDI Scholars
Monocultures
Globalization is unsustainble. Obsession with production forces monocultures Vandana Shiva, Founder Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, Poverty and Globalization, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_2000/lecture5.stm, accessed 8/23/03
In giving food to other beings and species we maintain conditions for our own food security. In feeding earthworms we feed ourselves. In feeding cows, we feed the soil, and in providing food for the soil, we provide food for humans. This worldview of abundance is based on sharing and on a deep awareness of humans as members of the earth family. This awareness that in impoverishing other beings, we impoverish ourselves and in nourishing other beings, we nourish ourselves is the real basis of sustainability. The sustainability challenge for the new millennium is whether global economic man can move out of the worldview based on fear and scarcity, monocultures and monopolies, appropriation and dispossession and shift to a view based on abundance and sharing, diversity and decentralisation, and respect and dignity for all beings. Sustainability demands that we move out of the economic trap that is leaving no space for other species and other people. Economic Globalisation has become a war against nature and the poor. But the rules of globalisation are not god - given. They can be changed. They must be changed. We must bring this war to an end. Since Seattle, a frequently used phrase has been the need for a rule based system. Globalisation is the rule of commerce and it has elevated Wall Street to be the only source of value. As a result things that should have high worth - nature, culture, the future are being devalued and destroyed. The rules of globalisation are undermining the rules of justice and sustainability, of compassion and sharing. We have to move from market totalitarianism to an earth democracy. We can survive as a species only if we live by the rules of the biosphere. The biosphere has enough for everyone's needs if the global economy respects the limits set by sustainability and justice.
GDI Scholars
Economy
Free trade causes price fluctuations that unbalance the global economy Chris Keene, Coordinator of the Anti-Globalisation Network, 20 Excellent Reasons Why The WTO is Bad News, March 30, 2001, http://www.poptel.org.uk/panap/latest/wto10.htm, accessed 8/23/03
The trade system is increasing economic instability: The deregulation of financial markets and the revolution in information and communication technology has stimulated massive growth in short-term capital flows, undermining countries' economies during economic crises and increasing the number of people in poverty. Trade and investment in least developed countries - particularly in Africa - has been concentrated on primary commodities. Because of fluctuating commodity prices in global markets this leads to increased economic insecurity.
Free trade causes global race to the bottom in working conditions and wages and causes massive economic instability Michael Renner, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, 1998, World Security Challenges for a New
Century, p. 278-280 Given the relative ease of relocating factories and shifting investment resources across the planet, the pressure on countries and communities to remain competitive and offer an inviting investment climate is tremendous. In part, this means downward pressure on wages and a trend toward a low-common-denominator world with regard to working conditions, social welfare, and environmental regulations. The human consequences of all this can be seen in the spread of sweatshop factories in countries from El Salvador to Indonesia, in which workers are paid a pittance and
treated like disposable itemstheir dignity trampled upon, their human rights denied, and their efforts to unionize (to gain even minimal improvements in their daily lives) countered with often severe repression. These conditions present fertile ground for severe conflict. Ordinary
consumers in rich countries may benefit from this blatant exploitationin the form of cheap clothing and other productsbut as workers themselves, they cannot possibly compete with a labor force paid hunger-level wages. The corporate search for ever cheaper labor is a constant threat to workers. The intensity of recent strikes in France, Germany, and South Korea clearly demonstrates the stakes involved. In the absence of strong rules and norms, economic globalization could turn into a free-for-all, an intensifying competition among and within communities everywhere over jobs, income, and economic well-being. By generating deep apprehension and feelings of insecurity, the very unevenness and uncertainty of the globalization process is itself becoming a source of conflict. This sort of globalization primarily benefits the relatively few countries, communities, companies, and individuals with adequate capital, technological know-how, infrastructure, and entrepreneurial skills. The vast majority of countries and their populations are relatively powerless to affect the central workings and dynamics of the emerging global system, and are often highly vulnerable to its vagaries.
Even the IMF admits free trade destroys the global economy Reuters, 3/17/2003, http://www.forbes.com/markets/newswire/2003/03/17/rtr909541.html, accessed 4/7/03
The International Monetary Fund sounded more like its critics on Monday when it admitted there is little evidence globalization is helping poor countries. The IMF, which has often been the target of violent anti-globalization protests, in a new study found economic integration may actually increase the risk of financial crisis in the developing world. "Theoretical models" show that financial integration can increase economic growth in developing countries, the research found, but in practice it is difficult to prove this link. "In other words, if financial integration has a positive effect on growth, there is as yet no clear and robust empirical proof that the effect is quantitatively significant," the new report said. An overview of the study, which was put together by four researchers including the fund's chief economist Kenneth Rogoff, describes the conclusions as "sobering". The IMF often recommends that poor countries open their economies to foreign investors and free-market policies. But critics say those policies damage
vulnerable economies, raising poverty rates and destroying the environment. The fund's report found a small group of developing countries have picked up the "lion's share" of capital flows as financial links between countries have become more integrated. Nations with good economic policies are more likely to reap the most benefits and steer clear of financial crisis. HIGHER RISK OF CRISES International financial integration should also help countries to reduce economic volatility, the study said, but in reality this has not happened. "Indeed, the process of capital
account liberalization appears to have been accompanied in some cases by increased vulnerability to crises," the report said. "Globalization has heightened these risks since cross-country financial linkages amplify the effects of various shocks and transmit them more quickly across national borders." In the last 10 years, developing countries from Thailand and Russia to Argentina, have seen their economies collapse, even though many of them were trying to follow IMF-prescribed open market policies.
GDI Scholars
North/South
Free trade results in a hemorrhage of wealth from the South to the North Julius Nyerere, former president of Tanzania, February 1990, Recolonization GATT, the Uruguay Round & the
Third World, p. 21-22 They have never heard of Aid from the South to the North. What these innocent people do not realise is that through the workings of the present international economic arrangements, wealth flows almost all the time from the poor developing countries of the Third World to the industrialised and rich countries of the developed world. It flows from the primary producers to the industrialised countries, from the ignorant to the knowledgeable. How could they know these things? Virtually nothing in the Northern media gives them such information. Yet that is the reality. The facts can be extracted from the statistics of all the international organisations; sometimes they are even mentioned in their Annual or Specialised Reports. Tens of billions of dollars flow every year from the Economic South to the Economic North through movements in the terms of trade which have been adverse to the underdeveloped countries almost continually since the 1950s. The prices of primary commodities like cotton, coffee, cocoa, copper etc. etc. - which are the major export products of the Third World - go down in relation to the prices of machinery, lorries, capital investments of all kinds, and most manufactured goods. To an ever increasing extent, Third World countries sell cheap and buy dear. Wealth flows also from South to North through financial mechanisms. For example: in the last decade poor nations have found that the Interest Rates on loans they incurred earlier have been increased by their creditors without consultation. They borrow to meet these obligations. And so get further and further into debt even as they transfer huge amounts to their creditors in debt service. Again, wealth flows through the Souths purchase of knowledge - through fees for education and training, through the purchase of books, through subscriptions to vital information agencies, and through payment for the use of patents, or trade marks, or production licences. And so on. Yet the poor nations of the Third World borrow money, or buy knowledge, or produce primary products for export rather than food for themselves, in order to invest in development - in a less poor future - or to meet their basic human requirements after natural or economic disaster has hit them. It is these purposes which are frustrated when they make a net export of resources to developed countries. This they have been doing for the last six years on account of debt servicing alone, without taking into account the permanent drain constituted by the unfair trading system.
North-South disparity is the primary impetus for nuclear proliferation and terrorism Bernard Lown, MD Co-Founder, IPPNW, 1996, http://www.ippnw.org/, Crude Nuclear Weapons Proliferation
and the Terrorist Threat Nuclear apartheid cannot endure. The stimulus to proliferation derives largely from an inequitable world order and the growing economic divide between rich and poor countries. One fifth of the world lives on the edge of subsistence. At a
time of potential abundance, more people are hungry than ever before. We end the century with far more desperately poor, illiterate, homeless, starving, and sick than we began. Nowhere are the inequities more in evidence than in the health sector. Eight hundred million people are without any health care at all. One-third of the worlds population lives in countries whose health care expenditures are far less than $12 per person per year (the bare minimum recommended by the World Bank) while the industrialized North spends more than $1,000 for health per person annually. Recent UN figures indicate that from 1960 to 1990, per capita income rose eight-fold in the North while increasing only half as much in the deprived lands of the South. This divide is likely to widen further while accelerating over-consumption in the North and burgeoning population pressures in the developing countries. As vital raw materials, scarce minerals, fossil fuels, and especially water become depleted, Northern affluence will be sustained by imposed belt tightening of impoverished multitudes struggling for mere subsistence. This is an agenda for endless conflict and colossal violence. The global pressure cooker will further superheat by the ongoing worldwide information revolution that exposes everyone to the promissory note of unlimited consumption, there by instilling impatience and igniting more embers of social upheaval. If desperation grows, the deprived will be tempted to challenge the affluent in
the only conceivable way that can make an impact, namely by going nuclear. Their possession enables the weak to inflict unacceptable damage on the strong. Desperation and hopelessness breed religious fundamentalism and provide endless recruits ready to wreak vengeance, if necessary by self immolation in the process of inflicting unspeakable violence on others. A nuclear bomb affords the cheapest and biggest bang for the buck. No blackmail is as compelling as holding an entire city hostage. No other destructive device can cause greater societal disruption or exact a larger human toll. Terrorists will soon raise their sights to vaporizing a metropolitan area rather than merely pulverizing a building.
GDI Scholars
North/South
Protectionist measures are the only way lesser developed countries can get off the mercantilist treadmill Tim Lang, Director of Parents for Safe Food and Colin Hines, coordinator of Greenpeace Internationals Economic Unit, 1993, The new protectionism, p. 13
Southern economies dependent on trading in primary, unprocessed commodities such as jute or coffee have seen declining returns in recent decades. They are on a treadmill having to sell more to get less in return. Another problem with specialized economies is their vulnerability to new inventions. An example is cane sugar, already threatened by artificial sweeteners and maize-derived sugars, but now additionally threatened by the impact of biotechnology. Cocoa is also under threat from a new biotechnology-derived substitute. Southern economies have got to prepare for such changes and need to jump off rather than speed up their efforts on the treadmill. Selective import controls can certainly be justified to keep luxury cars out, but to allow machine tools in, for example. One is gas guzzling for the elite while the other can serve a wider citizenry. Selective import controls can also be used to buy time to develop local infrastructures.
Free trade results in unsustainable debts that destroy macroeconomic stability Herman Daly, economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank, 1993, The Case Against Free Trade,
p. 128-129 D. Free trade and free capital mobility have interfered with macroeconomic stability by permitting huge international payments imbalances and capital transfers resulting in debts that are unrepayable in many cases and excessive in others. Efforts to service these debts can lead to unsustainable rates of exploitation of exportable resources; and to an eagerness to make new loans to get the foreign exchange with which to pay old loans, with a consequent disincentive to take a hard look at the real productivity of the project for which the new loan is being made. Efforts to pay back loans and still meet domestic obligations lead to government budget deficits and monetary creation with resulting inflation. Inflation, plus the need to export to pay off loans, leads to currency devaluations, giving rise to foreign exchange speculation, capital flight, and hot money movements, disrupting the macroeconomic stability that adjustment was supposed to foster.
Free trade causes debt crisis that destroy developing countries Tim Lang, Director of Parents for Safe Food and Colin Hines, coordinator of Greenpeace Internationals Economic Unit, 1993, The new protectionism, p. 18-19
Trade puts countries into an unequal gladiatorial contest. For the winners, it may be fine but for the losers its a hemorrhage. In 1989, for instance, Nigers export trade in goods collapsed by 40 per cent on 1988 exports, Nepals by 17 per cent, Burkina Fasos by 47 per cent, and Burundis by 41 per cent. Samoa, which exported $12 millions worth of merchandise in 1989, saw that figure offset by a worrying $67 million of imports in the same year.15 Shifts such as this pose terrible strains on poor countries. Before criticising these countries, remember that the UK and USA balances of payment in recent years have had deficits in billions of dollars, not the millions of Samoa. Under Presidents Reagan and Bush, the USA home to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) was allowed to build up staggering deficits, with no outside intervention. It helps if you control the purse-strings. In the trade in commercial services (banks, insurance etc) almost the same countries dominate and the same ones are at the bottom. Here, the USA and UK pull back some of their losses on goods, the UK by + $11.2 billion, the USA by + $31.5 billion, buj Brazil goes into deficit on services by $2 billion, and India by $1.6 billion.6 So what happens if a countrys balance of trade goes awry? To paraphrase Keynes on debt, if you owe a little it is your problem, whereas if you owe a huge amount it is the banks. Large debts give some leverage to debtors in that non-payment of huge sums can inflict considerable damage, as they threatened to when Latin American states refused to pay debt interest in the 1 980s. Small debts, however, allow banks to be ruthless, so poorer countries are doubly exploited neither being able to borrow large sums, which they need more than anyone, nor being able to pay back their debts easily. In practice, both large and small debtor countries are encouraged to trade their way out of debt. We explore whether this works, and what its impact is on the environment and the poor in Chapter 8 when we describe the so-called Structural Adjustment Programmes of the World Bank and the IMF.
GDI Scholars
Poverty
Globalization increases poverty and inequality and causes global unrest Mark Weisbrot, et al. and Dean Baker, co-directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR); Robert Naiman, senior policy analyst at CEPR; and Gila Neta, research associate at CEPR, August 7, 2000,
http://www.cepr.net/response_to_dollar_kraay.htm, accessed 12/7/02 The authors note that there are 108 episodes in which per capita GDP grew at a rate of at least 2 percent per year: in 102 of these episodes, income of the poor also rose. This statement, quoted by The Economist in its laudatory article on the paper, is taken as evidence of a highly stable relationship between the income of the poor and per capita income. But this is actually a much weaker statement than appears at first glance; for the majority of data points do not meet the threshold of 2 percent per capita GDP growth. In other words, this statement really means that when the economy is growing rather rapidly, the income of the poor does rise-but it would indeed be shocking if this were not true. Among the authors data, there are 35 episodes where the income of the poor actually fell while per capita income rose, over a period of at least five years.[16] Two of these episodes occurred in the United States: the authors data show the per capita income of the poor falling from 1979-84, and 1989-94, while per capita income rose. In fact, if we widen our angle to encompass the majority of the labor force, it helps to explain the backlash against globalization-- which the authors dismiss as fundamentally misinformed-- that has arisen here. The real median wage in the United States is no higher today than it was in 1973. Real wages for the bottom quintile of the labor force actually dropped by about 9 percent from 1973 to 1997. Since this has been a period in which the US economy has opened up fairly rapidly-- trade as a share of GDP has doubled-- it should not be surprising that globalization would be seen by the majority of the population, as well as by labor unions and public interest groups, as a threat to the well being of the less well-off. Since 1973, per capita income in the US has risen by 70 percent. For the median wage and bottom-quintile wage to actually fall during this same period is an economic change of momentous proportions, from the point of view of the majority of Americans. For comparison, during the first half of the post-World War II era, the wages of the bottom three quintiles increased roughly in step with the average (which rose 80 percent from 1946-73). So it is a relatively recent-- and historically unprecedented-- phenomenon for the majority of the US labor force to be excluded from sharing in the gains from economic growth.
GDI Scholars
Culture
Free trade destroys cultural diversity Maude Barlow, chair of The Council of Canadians, Autumn 2001, Earth Island Journal,
http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/cultural/2001/1001mono.htm Global cultural homogenization is sweeping the world. Indian physicist and activist Vandana Shiva calls it "monoculture of the mind." Dominated by US and Western values and lifestyles, driven by a consumerbased, free-market ideology and carried through the massive US entertainment-industrial complex, the global monoculture has infiltrated every corner of the Earth. In China, Latin America, the Pacific Region, South America, Africa and the industrialized world, young people want Nike sneakers, Gap clothes, Michael Jordan T-shirts, the latest CDs, Hollywood blockbuster movies, American television and mass-market books. Around the world, North American corporate culture is destroying local tradition, knowledge, skills, artisans and values. Artisans groups trying to sell their products locally have been wiped out by global fashions. Much more than an economic problem, the decline of artisanship may be consuming some of the world's older traditions and finer crafts and eroding the world's cultural diversity, with little notice. There are no clear estimates of the number of artisans in the world, although some crafts groups believe it is the largest employer outside agriculture. Says the Toronto Globe and Mail's John Stackhouse, "With each endangered craft are centuries of songs, expressions and lifestyles that are part of an artisan's creative environment." Nawal Hassan, an Egyptian artisan-activist, adds, "This is an issue of identity. All our civilization has ceased to be spiritual. Our civilization has become commercial." Combined with the destruction of the habitat of aboriginal citizens in many parts of the world, this assault on local cultures is having a profound impact. Hundreds of languages spoken today are lost each decade and it is estimated that one-half of the world's 6,000 languages will no longer be spoken or read by the end of the 21st century. Technology is also advancing one culture and one language. The US has more computers than the rest of the world combined. English is used in 80 percent of websites, yet fewer than one in ten people worldwide speak the language. Everywhere, Internet access divides educated from illiterate, rich from poor, young from old and urban from rural. For many countries feeling the deadening and harmonizing impacts of economic globalization, protecting cultural diversity has become as important a fight as preserving biodiversity. Many societies, particularly indigenous peoples, view culture as their richest heritage, without which they have no roots, history or soul. Its value is other than monetary. To commodify it is to destroy it.
Cultural survival is key to human survival Maivan Clech Lam, Visiting Associate Professor at American University Washington College of Law, 2000, At
The Edge of the State: Indigenous Peoples and Self-Determination, p. 205-206 Nevertheless, as anthropologists know, ethnicity is both an enabling and an inescapable condition of human existence. It is a collective system of meaning that generates social energy which can be put to constructive and destructive uses equally. Stavenhagen writes: Cultures are complex patterns of social relationships, material objects, and spiritual values that give meaning and identity to community life and are a resource for solving the problems of everyday life. That some very ugly campaigns in modern history, usually unleashed by the destructive economic and military policies of the worlds powerful states, have tapped, frighteningly successfully, into ethnic energy is undeniable. But it is just as undeniable that knowledgeof the universe, of a specific part of it, of workable social relationships, of human naturethat is crucial to the project of human survival remains separately encoded in the distinctive cultures of ethnic groups. No human community or ethnic group can construct an informed and meaningful future if it is cut off from its cultural past. And alienation from meaning, as much as exploited meaning, can lead to violence.
GDI Scholars
Culture
Free trade destroys indigenous culture Helena Norberg-Hodge, Director, ISEC, 1999, The Ecologist, The March of the Monoculture,
http://www.isec.org.uk/articles/march.html Today, as wealth is transferred away from nation states into the rootless casino of the financial markets, the destruction of cultural integrity is far more subtle than before. Corporate and government executives no longer consciously plan the destruction they wreak indeed they are often unaware of the consequences of their decisions on real people on the other side of the world. This lack of awareness is fostered by the cult of specialisation that pervades our society: the job of a public relations executive is confined to producing business-friendly sound bites, while time pressures and a narrow focus prevent a questioning of their overall impact. The tendency to undermine cultural diversity proceeds, as it were, on automatic pilot as an inevitable consequence of the spreading global economy. But if the methods employed by the masters of the Global Village are less brutal than in colonial times, the scale and effects are often even more devastating. The computer and telecommunications revolutions have helped to speed up and strengthen the forces behind the march of a global monoculture, which is now able to disrupt traditional cultures with a shocking speed and finality which surpasses anything the world has witnessed before. Preying on the young Today, western consumer conformity it descending on the less-industrialised parst of the world like an avalanche. Development brings tourism, western films and products and, more recently, satellite television to the remotest parts of the earth. All provide overwhelming images of luxury and power. Adverts and action films give the impression that everyone in the West is rich, beautiful and brave, and leads a life filled with excitement and glamour. In the commercial mass culture which fuels this illusion, advertisers make it clear that westernised fashion accessories equal sophistication and cool. In diverse developing nations around the world, people are induced to meet their needs not through their community or local economy, but by trying to buy in to the global market. People are made to believe that, in the words of US advertising executive in China, imported equals good, local equals crap. Even more alarming, people end up rejecting their own ethnic and racial characteristics to feel shame at being who they are. Around the world, blonde-haired blue-eyed Barbie dolls and thin-as-a-rake cover girls set the standard for women. Already now, seven-year-old girls in Singapore are suffering from eating disorders, and it is not unusual to find East Asian women with eyes surgically altered to look more European, dark-haired Southern European women with hair dyed blonde, and Africans with blue- or green-coloured contact lenses aimed at correcting dark eyes. The one-dimensional, fantasy view of modern life becomes a slap in the face for young people in the Third World. Teenagers in particular come to feel ashamed of their traditions and their origins. The people they learn to admire and respect on television are all sophisticated city dwellers with fast cars and designer clothes, spotlessly clean hands and shiny white teeth. Yet they find their parents asking them to choose a way of life that involves working in the fields and getting their hands dirty for little or no money, and certainly no glamour. It is hardly surprising, then, that many choose to abandon the old ways of their parents for the siren song of a western material paradise. For millions of youths in rural areas of the world, modern Western culture appears vastly superior to their own. They see incoming tourists spend as much as $1,000 a day the equivalent of a visitor to the US spending $50,000 a day. Besides promoting the illusion that all Westerners are multi-millionaires, tourism and media images also give the impression that we never work since for many people in the developing world, sitting at a desk or behind the wheel of a car does not constitute work. People are not aware of the negative social or psychological aspects of Western life so familiar to us: the stress, the loneliness, the fear of growing old, the rise in clinical depression and other industrial diseases like cancer, stroke, diabetes and heart problems. Nor do they see the environmental decay, rising crime, poverty, homelessness and unemployment. While they know their own culture inside out, including all of its limitations and imperfections, they see only a glossy, exaggerated side of life in the West.
Free trade destroys cultural diversity Martin Khor, Director of the Third World Network, 1993, The Case Against Free Trade, p. 103-104
The Uruguay Round agreements are also likely to accelerate the evolution of a monoculture in areas such as media, films, TV news and feature programmes, and also educational and health services. This will be through the liberalization of services that would pressurize Third World countries to accept and receive the cultural and professional services of foreign companies and individuals. Governments will find increasingly difficult to regulate or prevent such cultural and service imports. Since the largest and most powerful cultural enterprises belong to the North, the already rapid spread of modern Western-originating culture will be accelerated even more. Cultural diversity would thus be rapidly eroded.
GDI Scholars
Patriarchy
Free trade generates increased female wage labor Bama Athreya, deputy director for the International Labor Rights Fund, December 2002,
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/briefs/vol7/v7n15femtrade.html, accessed 8/24/03 Trade liberalization and the rise of export-oriented industries rely on female wage labor, particularly in manufacturing. The World Development Report estimates that women constitute 70-90% of workers in export processing zones (EPZs) worldwide. In agricultural industries, women make up approximately 43% of the formally documented agricultural work force, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). FAO studies note that when including informal participation in this sector, particularly in developing countries, women may produce well over half of the worlds food. In short, the worlds consumers rely on female labor.
Free trade encourages female wage labor which is closely tied to oppression of women Bama Athreya, deputy director for the International Labor Rights Fund, December 2002,
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/briefs/vol7/v7n15femtrade.html, accessed 8/24/03 The sweatshop issue has been of particular concern to womens movements around the world, and it is no wonder. Scenes of life in sweatshops have provided consumers with a graphic illustration of the problem: a work force that is overwhelmingly young, single, and female is pitted against a management that is overwhelmingly middle-aged and male. It is hard to see how the global trade rules have benefited women, when the vast majority of new jobs available to women are just sweatshop jobs. Whats wrong with these jobs? Women in developing countries generally receive lower pay than men for the same work, according to data from the International Labor Organization (ILO); at best, women average 50-80% of wages earned by their male counterparts. Female workers do not enjoy the same benefits as male workers, since women are more often relegated to contract work without any social welfare benefits, and they are the first to be laid off in times of economic difficulty. Women are also less likely to be given opportunities for training or promotion. The litany of routine abuses suffered by women workers worldwide in the light manufacturing industries has been well-documented. They are forced to work long hours for wages that often do not even meet the minimum guaranteed by local law. For instance, workweeks of 60 to 80 hours are routine in China and many parts of Southeast Asia, according to reports by the National Labor Committee, Clean Clothes Campaign, and others. The Maquila Health and Safety Support Network reports that women workers worldwide are routinely exposed to extremely unsafe working conditions, resulting in illness, loss of limbs, or even loss of lives.
GDI Scholars
Food shortages
Trade liberalization causes cycles of food shortages Seedling, October 1996, http://www.grain.org/publications/oct961-en.cfm
In the South, the different elements of trade liberalisation often translate directly into food insecurity. Among these elements the following have the most severe impacts on peoples livelihood. In addition they easily result in internal migration, urban growth and environmental destruction: * undoing land reform and allowing concentration of land ownership * privatising water * introducing monopoly control on seeds through IPRs * diverting land from food to cash crops for exports * diverting food from local to global markets Volatile prices and globalisation are creating an unstable, insecure and costly food system and undermine the ecological security of agriculture, the livelihood security of farmers and the food security of both poor and affluent consumers. "We in the South Asian subcontinent have more than the World Bank indices as our guide. We have our history", says Vandana Shiva. "India's worst famines took place when India's economy was most integrated though the globalisation of the colonial period."
Blips in food prices kill billions Tampa Tribune, 1-20-96

On a global scale, food supplies - measured by stockpiles of grain - are not abundant. In 1995, world production failed to meet demand for the third consecutive year, said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. As a result, grain stockpiles fell from an average of 17 percent of annual consumption in 1994-1995 to 13 percent at the end of the 1995-1996 season, he said. That's troubling, Pinstrup-Andersen noted, since 13 percent is well below the 17 percent the United Nations considers essential to provide a margin of safety in world food security. During the food crisis of the early 1970s, world grain stocks were at 15 percent. "Even if they are merely blips, higher international prices can hurt poor countries that import a significant portion of their food," he said. "Rising prices can also quickly put food out of reach of the 1.1 billion people in the developing world who live on a dollar a day or less." He also said many people in low-income countries already spend more than half of their income on food.
Food shortages lead to World War III William Calvin, theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington, Atlantic Monthly, January, The Great Climate Flip-Flop, Vol 281, No. 1, 1998, p. 47-64
The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields would cause some powerful countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands -- if only because their armies, unpaid and lacking food, would go marauding, both at home and across the borders. The better-organized countries would attempt to use their armies, before they fell apart entirely, to take over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or starving their inhabitants if not using modern weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for the remaining food. This would be a worldwide problem -- and could lead to a Third World War -- but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. Present-day Europe has more than 650 million people. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic.
GDI Scholars
Food shortages
Free trade causes increases in food prices Chakravarthi Raghavan, Editor-in-Chief of the Press Trust of India, 1990, Recolonization, p. 174-175
Whatever be the merits or claims of long-term benefits through free trade and liberalisation, it is also clear that any liberalisation would result in higher world prices and thus increased import prices of food for the net food importing Third World countries. Third World exports are concentrated in tropical products where, with the exception of sugar, improved market access will not result in higher world prices. For this class of countries, gains from trade liberalisation will be much smaller than losses in higher import costs. A study by the Commonwealth Secretariat notes that in a world of freer trade, most Third World countries would prove to have, or be able to develop, an international competitive advantage in producing and exporting staple agricultural products at present exported under subsidy by the major ICs. Yet for most developing countries, liberalisation would be likely to cause or exacerbate balance of payments problerns in the short and, may be, medium term, and substantial financial support would be needed to help them overcome these difficulties. For all these reasons, this paper attaches special importance to the concept of a development clause which particularly for countries of Africa and Asia - would recognise the distinctive role of small-scale farmers.
Free trade causes global food instability Seedling, October 1996, http://www.grain.org/publications/oct961-en.cfm
Countries in which governments have surrendered food security programs based on self sufficiency to the whims of the global market are now in severe trouble. Mexico is just an example: the Mexican government eliminated policies that encouraged domestic production and began - with the coming into force of the NAFTA Agreement _ relying on the ability to purchase cheap U.S. grain. Now Mexican demand for imported grain is rising just when prices are high: imported corn is averaging $180 per ton this year, compared with $90 per ton in 1995. By the end of June, 1996, corn imports had totalled $615 million, compared with $365 million spent on imported corn during the entire year of 1994. The food crisis is already affecting the poor: in late May, over 400 men, women and children stopped a grain train in the settlement of Monterrey and carried its cargo off to their homes. Shouting "We're hungry!", women hauled off the contraband in buckets and two-year-old children carried it across the tracks in plastic bags. At the end of the day, 40 tons of corn had disappeared into the community of San Nicols de la Garza. And this was no isolated event. "For hungry people in Mexico, trade-led food security policy isn't working", says Karen Lehman from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. Transnationals hold the reins As a result to the US crop failure, multinational grain traders such as the US giants Cargill and Continental Grain are turning to other producers. India's wheat exports have increased dramatically. Under the free trade regime introduced in India, exports of cereals in percentage of total exports have increased from 1.4% in 1990-91 to 3.4% in 1995-96. This might sound like good news for India. But, as Vandana Shiva says: "Cargill and Continental Grain are buying wheat at $60 to $100 per tonne from India and selling it at $230-240 per tonne on the international market, making a neat $130-170 profit per tonne, while India is loosing $100m in exports because of the concentration of power in the hands of five merchants of grain". In a world where 20 transnational companies control most of the worlds agricultural trade, it does not make much sense to describe countries as economic units. It is the corporations that buy, trade and sell the staple food worldwide, create shortages and surpluses, manipulate supply, demand and commodity prices, suck money from international organisations for emergency food relief, manage most food aid and carry out commercial food transactions made by governments. It is commonly said that it was the top executives of these companies who wrote the terms of the GATT Agreement, and their companies are the ones that push for and profit from trade liberalisation. For the agriculture negotiations, former US President Reagan appointed a life-time executive official of the Cargill company - by far the world's largest agribusiness corporation - to draft the US proposals and to serve as chief official negotiator. It comes as no surprise therefore, that the rules of global trade favour transnational agribusiness over all other interests.
GDI Scholars
Tobacco
Globalization spreads tobacco, killing hundreds of millions Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director General of the World Health Organisation, Health and Population, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_2000/lecture4.stm, accessed 8/23/03 Interestingly enough, not only infectious diseases that spread with globalisation. Changes in lifestyle and diet prompt an increase in heart disease, diabetes and cancer. More than anything, tobacco is sweeping the globe as it is criss-crossed by market forces. Only weeks after the old socialist economies in Europe and Asia opened up to Western goods and capital, camels and cowboys began to appear on buildings and billboards. Those who think that tobacco-related death and disease is mainly a burden for the rich countries are mistaken. If the growth in tobacco use goes unchecked, the numbers of deaths related to its use will nearly triple, from four million each year today to 10 million each year in thirty years. More than 70% of this increase will take place in the developing countries.
GDI Scholars
Democracy
Free trade destroys democracy Ralph Nader, 1993, The Case Against Free Trade, p. 11-12
One of the clearest lessons that emerges from a study of industrialized societies is that the centralization of the power of commerce is environmentally and democratically unsound. No one denies the usefulness of international trade and commerce. But societies need to focus their attention on fostering community-oriented production. Such smaller-scale operations are more flexible and adaptable to local needs and environmentally sustainable production methods, and more susceptible to democratic controls. They are less likely to threaten to migrate, and they may perceive their interests as more overlapping with general community interests. Similarly, allocating power to lower level governmental bodies tends to increase citizen power. Concentrating power in international organizations, as the trade pacts do, tends to remove critical decisions from citizen influenceits a lot easier to get a hold of your city council representative than international trade bureaucrats. All over this countryand indeed all over the worldthere is a bubbling up of citizen activity dealing with consumer rights, the environment, and public health. People want safe and healthy food, products, and services. They want solar energy instead of fossil fuels; they want recycling; they want to contain soil erosion and to clean up toxic waste dumps; they want safer, environmentally benign materials instead of others that happen to be sold in greater numbers worldwide. And if local or state governments can make decisions to help achieve these goals, then people can really make a difference. But if local and state standards can be jeopardized by a foreign countrys mere accusation that the standards are a non-tariff trade barrier, if countries must pay a bribe in trade sanctions to maintain laws ruled to be trade barriers by foreign tribunals, if a companys claim that the burden the standard would impose is so great that they would have to pick up their stakes and move elsewhere, then the evolution of health and safety standards worldwide will be stalled. For it is rare that regulatory breakthroughs occur at the national, let alone international, level. Usually, a smaller jurisdictiona town, city, or stareexperiments with a standard, other cities and states copy it and, eventually, national governments and international governments, lagging behind, follow their lead. This percolating-up process will be squelched by GATT and NAFTA, with top-down mercantile dictates replacing bottom-up democratic impulses.
Global democratic consolidation is essential to prevent many scenarios for war and extinction. Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, October 1995, Promoting Democracy in
the 1990s, http://www.carnegie.org//sub/pubs/deadly/dia95_01.html, accessed on 12/11/99 OTHER THREATS This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.
GDI Scholars
Prolif
Globalization causes proliferation Lieutenant Colonel Antulio Echevarria II, Director of Strategic Research at the Strategic Studies Institute, Globalization And The Nature Of War, Strategies Studies Institute, March, 2003,
http://www.mindfully.org/WTO/2003/Globalization-War-SSI%20Mar03.htm, accessed 8/23/03 Globalization also facilitates the proliferation of destabilizing capabilities, such as weapons of mass destruction or mass effect. Eleven countries currently have nuclear weapons programs; thirteen more are actively seeking them. More than 25 countries now possess ballistic missiles, and over 75,000 cruise missiles are in existence, with the number expected to rise to between 80,000 and 90,000 by 2010.17 Also, at least 17 countries including the so-called Axis of Evilcurrently have active chemical and biological weapons programs, and the number is rising. As the Assistant Secretary of State for Non-proliferation recently explained, despite the provisions of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and the Chemical and Biological Weapons conventions, proliferation of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high explosive/high yield weapons continues worldwide: There is an intense sort of cooperation that goes on among countries that are trying to acquire such weapons. For example, China and North Korea have long contributed to the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons, both for strategic leverage against the United States and for economic advantages. Thus, globalization assists some powerful motives that run counter to nonproliferation efforts.
Proliferation causes nuclear war Samuel Totten, Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of Arkansas, The Widening Circle of Genocide, 1994, p. 289
There are numerous dangers inherent in the spread of nuclear weapons, including but not limited to the following: the possibility that a nation threatened by destruction in a conventional war may resort to the use of its nuclear weapons; the miscalculation of a threat of an attack and the subsequent use of nuclear weapons in order to stave off the suspected attack; a nuclear weapons accident due to carelessness or flawed technology (e.g., the accidental launching of a nuclear weapon); the use of such weapons by an unstable leader; the use of such weapons by renegade military personnel during a period of instability (personal, national or international); and, the theft (and/or development) and use of such weapons by terrorists. While it is unlikely (though not impossible) that terrorists would be able to design their own weapons, it is possible that they could do so with the assistance of a renegade government.
GDI Scholars
Terrorism
Globalization facilitates terrorism Lieutenant Colonel Antulio Echevarria II, Director of Strategic Research at the Strategic Studies Institute, Globalization And The Nature Of War, Strategies Studies Institute, March, 2003,
http://www.mindfully.org/WTO/2003/Globalization-War-SSI%20Mar03.htm, accessed 8/23/03 In the global war on terrorism, the element of blind natural force is playing the decisive role. Globalization has, among other things, contributed to the creation of fertile breeding grounds for terrorism as some groups try to resist its encroachment. Al Qaeda has associated the United States with the spread of globalization, which it sees as a form of decadence. Building on the perception that Islamic societys current political and economic problems are the result of the Wests decadent values and duplicitous policies, Al Qaeda has penetrated Islamic nongovernmental organizations and woven itself into the social, political, and religious fabric of Muslim societies. Consequently, it has managed to create a substantial support base that may enable it to regenerate itself indefinitely.53 Despite the arrest of hundreds of operatives in North America and abroad since the attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, Al Qaeda has created new cells and reconstituted older ones.54 While operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere have led to the killing or capture of some 16 of its 25 key leaders, Al Qaedas ideology remains intact and will probably continue to draw young Muslims.55
Terrorist attack would spread pathogens globally, causing extinction John Steinbruner, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, chair of the committee on international security and arms control of the National Academy of Sciences, Foreign Policy, December 22, 1997
That deceptively simple observation has immense implications. The use of a manufactured weapon is a singular event. Most of the damage occurs immediately. The aftereffects, whatever they may be, decay rapidly over time and distance in a reasonably predictable manner. Even before a nuclear warhead is detonated, for instance, it is possible to estimate the extent of the subsequent damage and the likely level of radioactive fallout. Such predictability is an essential component for tactical military planning. The use of a pathogen, by contrast, is an extended process whose scope and timing cannot be precisely controlled. For most potential biological agents, the predominant drawback is that they would not act swiftly or decisively enough to be an effective weapon. But for a few pathogens - ones most likely to have a decisive effect and therefore the ones most likely to be contemplated for deliberately hostile use - the risk runs in the other direction. A lethal pathogen that could efficiently spread from one victim to another would be capable of initiating an intensifying cascade of disease that might ultimately threaten the entire world population. The 1918 influenza epidemic demonstrated the potential for a global contagion of this sort but not necessarily its outer limit.
GDI Scholars
Hurts war on terror

Free trade undercuts Americas ability to fight terrorism William Hawkins, The War on Terrorism Precludes Free Trade As Practiced Today, November 20, 2001,
http://www.tradealert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=58, accessed 8/24/03 Second, when the United States builds new military systems it must not make them dependent on foreign sources for key components or manufacturing capabilities. For the U.S. to depend on foreign sources for items critical to the production or support of its weapons systems is to create a new vulnerability that would be easier for an opponent to attack than it is to go after our armed forces directly in the field. The risk factors of moving defense related industries outside American borders are many, starting with location. The continental United States is still the most secure territory on the planet, and we are in the process of making it more so. Factories placed anywhere else, along with any associated engineering and shipping facilities, would be easier to attack by either conventional or terrorist means. Besides physical security of manufacturing operations, the reliability of foreign defense industries depend on a variety of factors, including their trade and investment relations with countries that may be adversaries of the United States. We have already seen how tepid political support for American actions in Afghanistan has been, even among some European allies. Many of these states oppose U.S. economic sanctions on Iraq and Iran, and might be driven to withhold military components or systems in order to protect their business interests from retaliation in case of war. As in the current war in Afghanistan, most of America's main trading partners are not engaged in the conflict. They will assess their options with the view of protecting their interests, not ours. The classical theory of "free" trade, leading to interdependence, was designed for a world at peace. It has never been a sustainable system because the world has never remained at peace for very long. The dawn of the 21st century doesn't appear to be any different, which means that the United States must look to it own productive resources first and foremost.

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***FREE TRADE GOOD

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COLLAPSE OF FREE TRADE LEADS TO RECESSION

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Blips in food prices kill billions Tampa Tribune, 1-20-96

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Blips in food prices kill billions Tampa Tribune, 1-20-96

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Hurts war on terror

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