Tag Archives : WTO

The global fate of fisheries, their decline and overexploitation, may yet show a more promising environmental future. Where trade agreements failed to halt the overfishing of oceans, the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place next month in Copenhagen may yet be the solution. The trick lies in the pledge by the leaders of the G20 group [...]

Foreign business investors are finding it still difficult to ever do business in China, in spite of the hope that it is China that will pull the world out of the recession. Foreign business isn’t exactly booming in China. “China accounts for less than 2% of the global sales of drugs giants such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Bayer.’ On the other [...]

Supporters of the World Trade Organization have sung praises on how the organization is the institution of even the smallest countries and the most inconsequential economies. They evoke an impression of a welcoming congregation where everybody has an equal footing, equal voice, equal presence, and equal significance. That’s an impossible scenario, [...]

Before 2000, the buzzword ‘WTO’ was less understood. The primordial concern of tariff reduction was somehow nondescript to people. It was, perhaps, in the later concept of the governments’ uses of ‘non-tariff barriers to trade’ that got the WTO much press. The WTO has been controversial in such areas as anti-dumping measures, environmental [...]

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 [...]

The managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, said that the world is immersed in a crisis of ‘extreme gravity’ and that it will not recover until the financial systems have been ‘cleaned.’ “To be frank, the situation is extremely serious,” he admitted at a meeting in Geneva organized by the International [...]

Cotton has become a major and controversial player in world trade. The crop has been affecting the political and economic decisions of the global producers in the cotton industry. In 2005, the WTO ruled US cotton subsidies as illegal and must be stopped. It seemed that the US government was spending billions just to subsidize cotton production. The [...]

There has been some criticism that the US rescue plan comes replete with protectionist measures. The plan is primordially meant to be the first law signed to ensure equal pay, thereby eradicating pay discrimination based on race and gender. What the recovery plan for the world’s biggest economy, now colloquially dubbed “Buy American,’ also reeks [...]

The US always speaks of itself as a leader. It got that concept right into its mind from the days of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ a delusional concept that enabled men to dream big dreams. It is all about conquest and expansion. In a word, imperialism. America has always envisioned itself to be ahead of the race, like it is its birthright. It thinks of [...]