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By Michael D. Roberts |
But the fact of the matter is that the industrialized, rich north amasses its fortunes by what is called "the terms of unequal and unfair trade." This unfair trading regime forces vulnerable, often underdeveloped markets and economies in Third World nations to open up and to allow unrestricted commercial dumping by multinational corporations, often to the detriment of their own fledgling manufacturing and commercial sectors. Then too, powerful nations routinely break trade rules that have been set up to serve their interests while instituting the most unbelievable forms of import protectionism imaginable.
Tantamount to trade rigging, these rich nations have set up a triumvirate to oversee the continued re-division of the world as a major "global" market suit their own narrow interests. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has routinely ruled in favor of rich western nations against small, defenseless Third World countries in a lop-sided, travesty of justice that makes any case they hear akin to a kangaroo court. Take the case of Caribbean bananas, for example. The entire Caribbean region accounts for a little less than 1 percent of the world's banana production but this industry is vital to the economic development and livelihood of many islands and their peoples.
The international banana monopolies, Chiquita and Dole, United States-based companies that do not produce bananas but nevertheless control more than two-thirds of the world's banana production, brought a case against Caribbean banana-producing nations claiming that the region's preferential status on the European market was a violation of free trade rules, and ran counter to the spirit of open competition. The WTO agreed with Chiquita and Dole without first considering the devastating impact of its unjust and unfair ruling on the fragile, dependent economies of these mini-states.
Such callousness is further compounded by the activities of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank that impose all kinds of conditions and insulting tags to financial packages for Third World countries including that they free their markets and open them up to unrestricted access by transnational corporations. What this does is to first place the host government into receivership by destroying its commercial sector because of the difficulty to compete with cheap, foreign commodity items, and finally to direct meddling in the affairs of these countries by the IMF. By this tactic alone one study by the trade group, Oxfam, claimed that rich nations rob the poor of over $100 billion a year. The same study concludes that more than 128 million people could be lifted out of poverty in Africa, Latin America, East Asia and South Asia if these regions were allowed by the world's rich nations to increase their exports by just one percent.
The same study says that a one percent increase in African exports was worth five times the amount that continent received in aid and debt relief combined or US$70 billion. By contrast for every US $100 generated by world exports, $97 goes to the high and middle income countries, and only $3 to low-income countries. It is this increased prosperity and richness that characterizes western industrial successes, that has spawned a corresponding increase of global poverty, especially in the Third World. This gap is widening day by day.
And its is the rigged rules of unfair trade that is enforced by organizations dominated by the world's rich nations, organizations like the WTO, that help lock millions of people out of the benefits of trade and development, and jam the door shut that traps them in conditions of abject poverty, disease and want. This is what has sparked serious demonstrations and protests every time that the WTO or the IMF hold any meeting or conference. It is why the leaders of the world's richest nations, the so-called G-8 countries, always hold their summits under heavy security in venues that resemble wartime bunkers insulated and protected from the very people that they are supposed to lead by heavily armed troops.
Current trade practices allow for the development of extremes of prosperity and poverty that have also created a curious internal dynamic: even in the rich nations there is a growing army of poor, desperate people marginalized on the basis of class and social position and sponsored by the encouraging of opportunistic governments. The sad thing is that these social and economic inequalities and the accompanying resistance and protests to same will not be confined to or respect national borders. The instabilities as a result of these abnormalities will threaten the peace of all nations.
The moral impediment to fair and just terms of trade between rich and poor nations is the obstacles put it its place by international organizations that only work in the interests of rich nations. Then there are the protectionism and trade restrictions that rich nations place on imports from other less developed nations while pressuring these governments to open up their markets and allow unrestricted access to them by multinational corporations. That way the companies of rich nations can dump sub-standard goods, demand high prices for them, and place these poor nations in an endless debt trap from which they are unable to extricate themselves.
Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America are the places that have suffered from these unfair and unjust practices. The price has been heavy in human terms. Poverty, the direct result of biased trade practices, is highest in these areas with the estimated 36.1 million people with HIV/AIDS, a whopping 95 percent live in poor, developing countries. Yet the world community hedges and pussy foots around putting up adequate resources to combat the spread of this disease in the cynical presumption that the spread of the disease can be contained to the shores of these poor, underdeveloped nations.
That's plain Russian Roulette and politically and economically naïve. Developing countries produce raw materials that the rich west needs, and when HIV/AIDS plays havoc with the work force of these developing nations the industrialized west must take note. By fairly balancing the terms of trade the rich nations would directly help the development of these poor, dependent nations. But I suspect that the politics of world trade is the engine that drives this unjust and unfair relationship.
The politics of world trade is that by enforcing and entrenching a regime of inequality and unfairness the powerful, rich G-8 nations make sure that the political relationship is a neocolonialist one that allow one set of nations to control the destiny of millions of the world's poor by other means unequal and unjust terms of trade.