2013 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
International Trade and the Environment: Does Globalization Create Havens of Pollution?
Author : Peter Debaere
Published in: Environmental Sustainability in Transatlantic Perspective
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
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The day was 30 November 1999. Thousands of protesters gathered in Seattle for a massive anti-globalization demonstration. The National Guard was called in to contain the masses and so was the riot police. The protest would turn out to be one of the most significant in the United States since the civil rights marches of the 1960s. The protesters formed a loose coalition of national and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with the environment and consumer protection, of labor unions such as the American labor movement represented by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and of religious and other groups. The protesters were marching toward the Washington State Convention and Trade Center where the third ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was held. On the WTO’s agenda was a new round of international trade negotiations that would include trade liberalizations in agriculture and services as well as questions of intellectual property rights protection. The anti-globalization protests quickly overshadowed the official negotiations and made clear the need for a broader public debate about globalization and its effects. The Seattle protests focused the world’s attention on many questions that, at least in the United States, had been lingering since the North American Free Trade (NAFTA) negotiations of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which aimed to liberalize trade and investment between the United States, Canada and Mexico.