[governance] Clinton Admits: "Free" Trade is Harmful to 3rd World

[William Drake]

On Apr 4, 2010, at 5:25 PM, Avri Doria wrote:

> 
> On 4 Apr 2010, at 07:24, Carlos A. Afonso wrote:
> 
>> Anyway, right now the recent Obama government's decision to reduce barriers to ethanol imports is meeting severe resistance from US corn farmers. Any similar attempt regarding other crops will have similar reactions, and basically nothing is new on this and nothing will change, remorseful discourses aside. Europe is of course no exception.
> 
> 
> just checking because i do not know, what are Brazil's policies regarding the protection of its farmers and industries?

Brazil and India have refused to liberalize their manufacturing and services sectors in exchange for agricultural concessions to the extent the US and Europe consider necessary in order to be able to sell a deal at home (particularly given that the US has already lost most of its industrial base and has had whole cities/states gutted).  Competition from China being a if not the principle concern in manufacturing.  
> 
> also i think it is easy to condemn other countries for such behavior, but when masses of people are unemployed and homeless, despite the fact that rich manufacturers and agribusiness are raking in the billions, the issue is slightly more complex then US and Europe are bad.  

Slightly...

The geometry of interest alignments and misalignments across countries and sectors may have become unworkable for a universal model.  There's a lot of concern in Geneva trade circles that the old architecture of broad based multilateral liberalization cannot deepen, and that discriminatory bilateral and plurilateral deals will be the default.

> also when the business leaders in the developing world are exploiting their workers and using child labor in many case to enable their capitalists to get rich, were does the motivation come from?
> 
> this your country bad, my country good stuff is not going to get us very far - though it does help the owners of our repspective countries a bunch.

and feels good.

BTW there are some important implications for people interested in IG too.  There's a whole complex of negotiations concerning telecom, Internet commerce, and ICT-related goods and services that have been underway for over a decade, since before the Doha Round began.  If the round fails the bits of interest to key industries will become the focus of renewed efforts to cut exclusive deals, the moratorium on applying customs duties to cross-border intangile transactions probably goes out the window, and so on.

Cheers

Bill____________________________________________________________
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