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 their ancestral lands from financial exploitation.
Second, trade rules at best complicate and at worst prevent government use of economic sanctions to penalize governments that condone genocide, practice torture, or commit other human rights violations. As explained in chapter 2, GATT’s Four Pillars command unconditional nondiscrimination in the treatment of imports from other Members. The principal and most effective enforcement tool of many human rights treaties and policies is precisely to discriminate among countries based on their human rights performance, to deny market access to the goods of these countries, or even to prohibit trade with them altogether.14 Trade rules require that WTO Members treat products that share similar physical characteristics and uses alike, even if one product (for example, a blouse) was produced using indentured child labor, while the other was not; or if one product (for example, a tropical hardwood armoire) was produced using unsustainable forestry methods, while the other was not; or if one product (petroleum, for example) was obtained by depriving indigenous peoples of their economic future, while the other was not. These contradictory approaches create important and unnecessary obstacles to just trade: using trade’s power to realize human rights objectives.
Third, and we believe most tellingly, human rights proponents complain that trade rules, by distancing themselves from responsibility for improving the human rights record, fail to take advantage of trade’s vast power by making compliance with human rights law a condition of participation in trade’s bounty. Beginning at the regional economic integration level and ultimately spreading to global rules of the WTO, trade instruments must, both from a legal and a policy perspective, command purposeful integration of trade law with human rights law. Globalization thus is faulted both for making the human rights situation worse through its activities and for not improving the human rights record through its ubiquitous presence and enormous power.
For example, human rights activists and workers in the North often hold the view that the developing economies of Latin America, in order to attract investment, engage in a “race to the bottom.” That is, they sacrifice human rights standards to provide lower costs for foreign investors.15 Most economic studies of why foreign investors choose certain countries for their operations discount these fears, noting that environmental costs, and even wage rates, cohabit a long list of factors that contribute to a corporate decision to invest. Nonetheless, the fear of a race to the bottom is so widespread that it affects the motivation of a developing country in decisions to protect the environment and to improve the conditions of workers. Thus, it is not surprising that the most fervent reaction against the Washington Consensus—that philosophical perspective that promotes industrialization and free trade by the private sector along with the reduction of government spending and regulation—has come from environmental and labor activists.16
There is an obverse to this coin. As the World Bank study notes, globalization is a powerful force for reducing poverty. It literally creates money. As Clive Crook has written in the Economist, “Globalisation, far from being the greatest cause of poverty, is its only feasible cure.”17 In developing countries, trade creates jobs that did not previously exist and that raise living standards. For example, during the last three decades of the 20th century, while the world’s population was increasing by two-thirds, the percentage of that population living on less than an adjusted two dollars per day decreased from 44 percent to 8 percent.18 Whether an econometric formula accurately can measure poverty is widely contested, however. The World Bank itself recognizes that poverty is a complex problem of which financial deprivation is but one component (see chapter 12 on poverty).
Trade also increases company profits, which theoetically allows lowering of prices, in turn raising real incomes of all consumers, rich or poor. Trade leads to technological innovation, which allows industries in developing countries to produce more efficiently, enabling people in these nations to buy more goods and services with less income. With increased living standards, governments and civil society can afford to focus on more than preventing starvation, which can lead to greater worker rights, improved health, broader freedom of association, and increases in other human rights.
To be sure, while trade’s compelling economic growth indeed has driven absolute poverty downward, some areas of the globe have longer resisted trade’s loud knock of opportunity, with unhappy results. For example, while Asia’s poor dropped dramatically as India, China, Japan, and others opened
