In The News

Russia Must Not Slip into Autocracy

James Woolsey September 24, 2003
Russia is officially a democratic country, but recent political shifts have made it seem otherwise. Russian President Vladimir Putin has pledged to crack down on corruption, but the latest prosecution efforts have been tainted with corruption themselves. Freedom of the press is largely nonexistent, and journalists who criticize human rights violations in Chechnya have been persecuted. And the...

U.N. Official Plans to Urge U.S. to Reconsider Farm Subsidies

Elizabeth Becker September 24, 2003
The director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) may find his message to Washington falls on deaf ears. With the 2004 presidential election on the line (and agribusiness's lucrative campaign donations very much in every politician's mind), congressmen and White House officials alike hesitate to believe that the $22 billion in subsidies offered to American farmers is a cause...

Can Rich Countries Stem the Outflow of Jobs?

Eddie Lee September 23, 2003
Last month, the United States lost 93,000 jobs, many of them in the service sector. This commentary in Singapore's Straits Times attributes this job loss to outsourcing by developed world companies. In an effort to cut costs, many companies are hiring workers in developing countries since they are willing to work for far less than their counterparts in the US and Singapore. As the...

No Good Reason to Dance

Ernesto Zedillo September 22, 2003
In the latest round of WTO talks, the chasm between 'developed' and 'developing' nations over agricultural subsidies proved too large to cross in only one week. The Cancun meeting has thus been largely declared a failure. Ernesto Zedillo, Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and former president of Mexico, says that this difficulty should be taken as a...

Bold Action Can Still Save Doha Round

Clyde Prestowitz September 19, 2003
With the collapse of the WTO trade talks last week, things do not bode well for the Doha Round – planned specifically to help developing countries – or for the global trading system in general. Former Reagan administration trade negotiator Clyde Prestowitz says, however, that in one simple unilateral move the US could earn enormous global goodwill and save the floundering world trading system....

US Economic Folly Should Worry Us All

Joseph Stiglitz September 17, 2003
US President Bush's recent request for global financial support to pay for the war in Iraq has met with little sympathy and more than a little gloating from countries who argue the US should never have entered Iraq. Compounding the world's amusement at Washington's financial problems are the Bush tax cuts that have decimated the budget surplus that existed when he came into office...

Field of Tears

Jonathan Watts September 16, 2003
Although we cannot know whether Lee Kyung-hae intended to die when he stabbed himself in the heart at last week's WTO meeting in Cancun, people in his hometown see him as a hero who would have given his life to bring attention to the plight of South Korean farmers displaced by trade liberalization. Once a successful farmer and advocate of modern farmer techniques – he even received an award...