Comment & Debate
Free trade is always profit oriented and greed driven. The expression coined by Prof.Terenece Bail, “Marketopi” rightly explain the harm caused by unbridled market economy. Marketopi identify and satirize the world in which social responsibility is lost and market forces have absolute control.
(Cyriac Thomas)
“Free Trade Can Work Against the Environment — or for It”. Sustainability Institute. Retrieved May 29th, 2008 – “The U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 mandated, among other things, that the tuna fleet must reduce the dolphin bycatch. (The law currently permits the fleet to catch no more than 20,700 dolphins a year in order to label the tuna “dolphin safe.”) To avoid this restriction, many California tuna boats moved down the coast to Mexico.Environmentalists went to court and in 1990 won an embargo against imports of Mexican tuna. Mexico appealed the ruling to GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which is the global equivalent of NAFTA. Mexico claimed that the tuna embargo was an unfair restraint of trade.A GATT panel set up to adjudicate the dispute ruled, to the horror of environmentalists, not only that Mexico was right, but that no nation can discriminate against any import because of its mode of production. That would be equivalent, said the panel, to one nation forcing its laws upon another. This sweeping judgement undercuts not just restrictions on tuna imports, but, for example, embargos against foods grown with harmful pesticides, or tropical timber harvested unsustainably, or textiles made with underpaid near-slave labor.”