If one shortcuts the path from the temptations of free trade and the current global recession, one can glean that free trade caused greedy and ambitious producers (plus all and sundry that support their endeavors in any which way) produce more and more, or perhaps even just attempt to produce more and more – all to fuel the overconsumption and greed for material things that pervade the world.

For instance, if you have the freedom to sell your clunky automobiles from the North Pole to the South Pole (as well as source your raw materials at dirt cheap costs from poor and underdeveloped countries), you would want to do everything to make sure you can produce that much volume as you think would serve your unimaginably expansive global markets.

Free trade, of course, has seen many debacles along the way, apart from the bad rap it has been getting because it happened to rear its ugly head in the form of a global economic meltdown.

Free trade would not have been the crowning glory of free economy’s ambition had it not been for the creation of the World Trade Organization evolved from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that was officially created in 1995.

153 member nations later (representing more than 95% of total world trade), the excesses of free trade that gave way to recession are now spawning a new economic culture of protectionism.

Protectionism is not new. The biggest economies of the world did not hit big time without having been protectionist in their respective past. What is curious is that the new wave of protectionism comes after the lessons of global free trade are now being painfully learned.

The WTO membership runs the gamut of economic and political scales: from one of the poorest (Sierra Leone) to one of the wealthiest (Switzerland), from the largest democracy on earth (India) to the smallest dictatorship (Cuba).

With the USA’s “Buy American” campaign that nobody is sure is being strictly implemented to China’s recent protectionist policy which we can all be sure will be strictly implemented, free trade may just have weakened its grip on mankind’s material ambitions on a global scale.

There are 32 new applicants for accession to the WTO. We can wonder how they evaluate their intended application in the controversial multilateral trading system – in the light of the current global recession.

Moreover, we wonder what’s really in the minds of the G20 now.

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Via the Atlantic/The Market Oracle/Pew Research Center