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EVERYONE IN THE Northwest knows that trade is good. After all, recently released numbers from the US Commerce Department confirm that the Puget Sound area leads the nation in the amount of export trade we generate, some $34 billion in 1998 alone.
But of course those numbers show only one side of the ledger. They tell us nothing about the cost of trade, and they tell us nothing about the potential cost from the kind of approach to free trade that is promoted by the WTO. The numbers also, naturally, fail to tell us anything about the social and economic disruptions that are not measurable in dollars or that are simply "netted out." Sure, trade volume goes up when expanding global corporations come to dominate more of our fishing and agricultural industries. But do we really think nothing is being lost?
The irony of the WTO meeting in Seattle—one that the international organizers may yet come to regret—is that while our city is famous for its flag-waiving international businesses, it also is the center of an antiglobalization movement, a movement for reduced consumption and more sustainable means of living. And since we're blessed with far more natural riches than most places in the world, we also have far more to lose from a free-for-all global economy, as the following Northwest voices make clear.
David Batker, a native of Washington and a veteran of seven years with Greenpeace, is now with the Asia Pacific Environmental Exchange, an activist group working on trade issues. He has a master's in economics.
Since the WTO was founded in January 1995, this is the first meeting in which they want to have a major expansion of the products they cover. They want to bring in forests, fisheries, chemicals, intellectual property rights, agriculture. This is the debate at the end of the 20th century; it's going to shape the face of our planet.
For example, we have a ban on the export of timber from national forest lands. The export ban enabled us to save a larger amount of forest because it reduces the demand on national forests. It also preserves local timber jobs because it insures that the wood products are processed locally. But the ban is clearly WTO-illegal. It clearly prevents trade in a product between countries.
If you then say, 'We're going to allow Japan and other countries to be purchasers of our national forest lands,' then the demand is going to be much larger and the pressure greater and you'll have an increase in cut. If you lower tariffs on forest products, forest products are going to be cheaper relative to other substitutes, and that will cause an increase in logging as well.
These forests provide a huge diversity of services: clean water, clean air, landslide protection, wildlife habitat—they're essential to our way of life here in the Northwest. But the WTO does not calculate those benefits into the trade equation.
This isn't a debate about whether we're going to have trade in forest products or not. It's a debate about how we're going to conduct that trade, whether we're going to remove a large number of trade restrictions that are in place to protect forests and say that trade rules take supremacy over all other rules.
Another example: Our state requires recycled content for state procurement of paper, because it helps boost the market [for recycled paper] to a more efficient level, which means less logging, less environmental damage. But those "green procurement" laws clearly would violate WTO rules because they would discriminate against countries that produce paper from mainly native forests and don't have the recycled content.
We also want more eco-labeling of forest products that tell us whether they were produced in an environmentally sound manner. That's important for moving to where we destroy less salmon habitat. But that also would violate the WTO requirement that you can't discriminate against products based on how they were produced.
Mark Ritchie is president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a nonprofit research organization in Minneapolis.
In Washington state, you are growing many fruits and vegetables that are labor-intensive and therefore much cheaper to produce in other countries. Washington pays high wages relative to Mexico, China, or Chile. It's not a warm climate year-round, so you are at some kind of competitive disadvantage.
If the current US trade proposals are accepted and adopted by the rest of the WTO, large sections of Washington state agriculture would face very intense competition from much cheaper imported goods. Some of the major commodities would face lower prices, and the ability of Washington state farmers to sustain those lower prices is very questionable given the precarious position they're in today. There is an expectation that an increase in international trade in wheat, which is to be achieved by [eliminating tariffs], would increase the volume of wheat going through Washington's ports. But with the high-cost structure of Washington wheat production—fairly expensive land, expensive water, high taxes—right now Washington farmers are losing money on every bushel sold. If the world price is driven down, they will lose more money.
