Negative Aspects of the World Trade Organization

The notion of the World Trade Organization seems optimistic. They promote free trade, and according to their own studies help alleviate poverty around the globe. Unfortunately there is a strong force of people that oppose the WTO for a number of justified reasons. My beliefs fall somewhere in the middle but lean against the WTO. I don’t feel that the WTO has made the right decision in many cases, and free trade often can damage the economies of weaker states. It is difficult to argue against the existence of the WTO, but it is easy to disagree with their decisions and operations. Overall I believe that the organization is necessary, but that some of their practices must change. Too often human rights, labor rights, environmental protection, and national sovereignty give way to corporate ambition.

Some basic negative effects of the WTO are illustrated in the harm that the organization has brought to human rights, the environment, and world hunger. In terms of labor rights, the WTO ruled that it is illegal for any government to ban a product on the basis of how it was produced. This means that corporations can get away with outsourcing cheap labor, even child labor, to reduce production costs. The WTO has failed to promote internationally recognized labor standards, which simply encourages corporations to seek out the least expensive labor often discarding ethics in the process.[1] In terms of the environment the WTO has stood in the way of many environmental protections throughout the world. In the United States there have been two heavily scrutinized cases pertaining to environmental protection. Case number one came with the very first WTO panel. The ruling undermined the U.S. Clean Air Act, which required that both domestic and foreign producers make cleaner gasoline. It was estimated by the U.S. government that this ruling would created a five to seven percent increase in annual emissions of nitrous oxide from imported gasoline.[2] The second case came when the WTO ruled against U.S. Endangered Species Act rules that protected sea turtles from getting killed in shrimpers’ nets. In this situation the U.S. complied with the WTO, and replaced the requirement that all countries seeking to sell shrimp in the U.S. had to ensure that their shrimpers used turtle-safe devices.[3] In addition to human rights and the environment, the WTO is undermining efforts to reduce world hunger. Farmers technically produce enough food in the world to feed everyone, yet “because of corporate control of food distribution, as many as 800 million people worldwide suffer from chronic malnutrition.[4]” Unfortunately the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture stresses that market forces should control agricultural policy, instead of state commitments to regulate decent farmer incomes and ensure food security. Additionally some policies of the WTO have generated a trend of outside industrially produced food being dumped into poorer countries. This not only increases hunger, it also destabilizes local production. Many of the problems lie with the unfair system by which decisions and trade laws are made.