By Brian Carnell

Friday, November 19, 1999

In its latest issue, The Nation has a forum on the World Trade Organization that has some very good critiques of the WTO as well as some absurd statements -- I'll just focus on Public Citizen's Lori Wallach at the moment.

First, Wallach offers an excellent critique of the WTO (and other "free trade" pacts) that even a right wing nut like myself can agree with:

The notion that the decision is between something called free trade and something called protectionism is total horsefeathers. That is a construct set up by the proponents of one set of rules for organizing the global economy. The proponents of this current version of it call it "free trade" and say that anything different is protectionism. The WTO is not anything that Adam Smith or David Ricardo had in mind when they wrote about free trade. The best thing you could call its 800 pages of regulations is managed trade. Only it's corporate-managed trade, and we want people-managed trade. They don't have free trade and we don't want no trade, so the real issue is what the rules of the road will be.

A very good point -- this is not free trade that's being proposed but rather extremely regulated trade. A better option would be for the United States to simply withdraw from these "free trade" pacts and simultaneously remove every impediment to the importing and exporting of goods into and out of the United States regardless of what other countries do.

On the other hand, Wallach opposes the patenting of cell lines which the WTO permits saying that "biological resources--genes, cells, species, people--should not be commodified and traded." If people want pharmaceutical companies to develop genetic therapies for diseases -- and some of those protesting the WTO in Seattle definitely want to stop such possibilites -- the only way this is going to happen is to allow patents in cell lines. Why would my company ever invest $500 million in developing a genetic therapy to treat cystic fibrosis if it has no patent protection, and thus no way to recoup the costs much less make a profit, on the final product?

Source:

Whose Trade? Lori Wallach, The Nation, December 6, 1999.

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