Getting Started
A General Introduction
For the Cyclops have no ships
with crimson prows,
No shipwrights there to build them
good trim craft
that could sail them out to foreign
ports of call
as most men risk the seas to trade
with other men.
Such artisans would have made
this island too a decent place to live in.
—Homer, The Odyssey
Just as Homer identified trade with the very concept of civilization, we seek by our analysis to identify just trade: specific paths that governments must follow to use trade’s enormous power for the advancement of human rights. The realities and the consequences of leaving undisturbed the profound disconnect between human rights law and international trade law are heartbreaking. For example, India’s historic opening to freer international trade in the 1980s brought huge gains to a middle class that in essence did not exist in the 1960s and now numbers more than three hundred million1 newly prosperous Indians. Against this inarguably positive economic growth must be seen the indifference of trade rules to one of a dozen foreseeable costs of India’s realization of Ricardo’s conception of comparative advantage—thousands of young Indian girls and boys chained to textile looms day and night to meet world demand for inexpensive apparel.
In Bolivia, while trade with Brazil in natural gas blossoms to enrich the country’s European-descended “white” elite, 90 percent of rural and predominantly Amerindian Bolivians live in utter poverty, unable to satisfy even basic requirements for sanitation, much less receive a secondary education.2 Families in Nicaragua and other poor Latin nations participate in globalization’s export boom by keeping their young children out of school to pick pesticide-laden tobacco, bananas, and vegetables. In El Salvador, the 2004 trade agreement among the United States and Central American countries promises increased employment in sugarcane production for the U.S. market, but at the cost of the education of more than the twenty-five thousand children as young as eight who work in the most dangerous job in agriculture, planting and cutting cane with sharp machetes and hazardous chemicals.3 Virtually all the children of La Oroya in the Peruvian Andes suffer from lead poisoning and other consequences of severe air, soil, and water pollution, including sulfur dioxide levels between 80 and 300 percent of those permitted by the World Health Organization. The cause is unfiltered, unlimited, uncontrolled pollution from the copper and lead smelter of transnational Doe Run, whose exports have earned the company hundreds of millions of Peruvian nuevos soles and the town the title of one of the ten most polluted cities on earth.4 In Papua New Guinea, the black islanders on Bougainville worked under slave-like conditions for the London-based mining company Rio Tinto to extract gold and copper, leaving behind tons of waste material. The resulting pollution of the air and water damned residents to decades of physical and mental health ills. When the islanders revolted, the army intervened to protect the government’s 20 percent of the mine’s profits, commencing a ten-year civil war. The legacy of Rio Tinto’s and the government’s insatiable appetites is the thousands of villagers killed, thousands more raped, burned villages, and other “atrocious human rights abuses.”5
Nature of the Intersections
A recent World Bank study poignantly summarized the troubling dilemma that this volume addresses: “Globalization is already a powerful force for poverty reduction as societies and economies around the world are becoming more integrated. Although this international integration presents considerable opportunities for developing countries, it also contains significant risks. Associated with international integration are concerns about increasing inequality, shifting power, and cultural uniformity”6 In small countries whose comparatively advantaged goods capture profitable shares of world exports, trade can actually worsen already-underdeveloped governmental institutions. Elite groups of large exporters with political sway prefer the freedom from regulation and oversight that weak ministries ensure.7 Globalization shifts power from governments and civil society to huge transnational corporations whose decisions take on global force.
What Amy Chua in World on Fire called the “market-dominant minorities” have disproportionately benefited from globalization and have disenfranchised the very majorities empowered by democracy.8 Globalization creates cultural uniformity by rewarding only those who traverse the global market, producing what that market requires, rather than what might ensure food security for a country or preservation of indigenous lifestyles. Globalization also has increased inequality in many ways. On one scale, the three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the forty-eight least developed countries. These indirect effects explain much of the basis for the burgeoning backlash against globalization, successfully articulated by massive protests of environmental, labor, and development advocates against the World Trade Organization ministerial meetings in Seattle in 1999, in Cancun in 2003, and in Hong Kong in 2005.
Protestors against globalization also have caused melees in various Central and South American capitals to protest free trade agreements with the United States. They staged demonstrations in Mar del Plata, Argentina, during the 2005 Summit of the Americas, which brought together the heads of state of hemispheric nations in an unsuccessful attempt to restart negotiations for a Free Trade Area of the Americas.9 Trade added terrorism as an unwanted intersection when Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group, which has engaged in decades of pillaging and holds some five hundred hostages, announced in 2007 that it will agree to a cease-fire if the FTA with the United States is scrapped.10
These protestors oppose globalization in all its forms, not only its most visible international trade aspects—the movement of goods and services across borders (imports and exports)—but also the many other inevitable ways in which economies, and societies, are growing closer. This often-forced intimacy has resulted from the telescoping both of distance and time by advanced communication and transportation technologies, control by multinational corporations of financial markets that affect our daily lives, cross-border investment and the outsourcing of jobs, and liberalization of exchange and capital controls. These activities have lessened government influence, transnationalized citizenship, and in general divested discretion from individual citizens through bestowal of power on anonymous and unaccountable actors.
For those who prefer numbers,11 consider the following: while world trade has increased at the astounding rate of nearly 400 percent in the past thirty years, fully one-fourth of the world’s population subsists on less than one dollar per day and one-half survives on less than two dollars per day. Even as international trade expands to account for at least 20 percent of the GDP of every developed nation, the World Food Program of the United Nations has expanded operations to feed twice as many hungry people in 2005 as in the previous year.12 As trade in the United States was expanding at three times the rate of its population increase, petroleum use—and with it climate-changing carbon emissions—grew by 20 percent. Virgin forests are fast disappearing. One child in five between the ages of five and fourteen remains in the workplace. The gap between the richest and poorest nations has increased by more than 100 percent in the last forty years. Someone dies of hunger every four seconds.13
Human Rights Criticism of Trade Rules
Human rights advocates direct three main criticisms at globalization in general and international trade in particular. First, critics claim that trade exacerbates human rights concerns, among other ways by encouraging sweatshops and child labor. Trade, its detractors argue, also results in overuse of the natural resources that give developing countries their comparative advantage. For example, tropical hardwoods of the Amazon rain forest and oil from beneath the Nigerian plains quickly are disappearing; this trade result encourages governments and multinational corporations to suppress indigenous peoples who try to protect