Abstract

Trade, along with the free movement of capital, is at the heart of today's international economy. But international trade is an intensely political and contested subject. In this book, Greg Buckman details possible future directions in global energy supplies and balance-of-payments imbalances. He argues that, just as current trading arrangements have been the product of past decisions emerging out of apparently unrelated considerations, so factors like future fossil fuel costs, global warming, and the economic imbalances between North and South are likely to impel a radical reshaping of the WTO and the principles enshrined in its agreements as well as the global trading system in general. A key contribution to thinking about possible trade policy reforms are the reforms and alternatives - themselves not always agreed or sufficiently thought through -- advocated by the global justice movement. This book outlines these diverse proposals to make global trade more sustainable in some detail. This book has been written to be both informative and empowering. It is an important contribution to clearer thinking, more effective campaigning, and fundamental policy reform in the field of international trade.
Greg Buckman is former national finance manager for the Wilderness Society of Australia and is currently treasurer of the Australian Greens. He is also a past co-editor of their magazine, Green. He has undertaken extensive economic research, particularly on issues concerning globalization, forestry and energy. His long involvement with the environment movement goes back to the successful international fight to save the Franklin River in Tasmania in the early 1980s. He is also the author of Globalization: Tame it or Scrap it? published by Zed Books in 2004.
'An interesting new approach to global trade issues - part textbook, part critique of mainstream policies and part alternative perspective on where we might go from here. All of these angles are desperately needed and they rarely come together in mainstream texts. Here they do, updated for the main debates both in the corridors of power, the halls of academia and the meeting rooms of NGOs. This makes the book extremely valuable.' Graham Dunkley, author of The Free Trade Adventure (2000) and Free Trade: Myth, Reality and Alternatives (2004)