|
by Sarah Wash '00 and Sonja Jacobs '00 The World Trade Organization (WTO) conference in Seattle (November 30-December 3) was protested by over 20,000 people on November 30 alone. Two main issues were protested: the effects on labor issues (global and domestic) of the WTO and the WTO and the environment. The WTO is basically designed to increase globalization and build an international economy, following Karl Marx's predictions based on the idea that capitalism, because it is rooted in an ideology of perpetual growth, must continue to seek fresh and exotic resources to increase rate of production and introduce new and exciting products to the market. In this spirit many new countries are encouraged to join the WTO. There are a few benefits that the small countries whose resources we seek will receive, and they mostly focus on the fact that these people will have the opportunity to get jobs in a westernized factory, agricultural or harvesting/mining/other means of getting raw materials. The drawbacks, however, far outweigh the benefits, especially since the proponents of WTO don't often mention the incidences in which the people are subsistence farmers on land that the government controls, or could easily exert control over by use of military force, and that the businesses buy the land from the government, not the people, and it forces the people to work in the agribusiness/factory or starve. The mainstream media is pretty much trying to stay away from these issues (at least on Minnesota Public Radio) and is focusing on the fact that a lot of protest groups in Seattle are using pretty silly means to get their views across (i.e. shutting down the city's transportation system, which not only impedes the WTO meeting, but prevents the non-government organizations--NGOs--who represent grassroots interests from getting to the conference as well), or the small minority who are violent. There are always complexities to issues, and globalization and economic development are not exceptions. Trade and globalization are not in and of themselves inherently bad things, in fact they can be good. But global systems of inequality need to be recognized as the real culprits here, which enable organizations like the WTO to wield a good deal of power, and possibly cause greater inequity than it helps.
|