Was reading this from Crooked Timber yesterday: Maria asks, how does OPEC exist in a world where of legal and institutional free trade? She says "I'm not looking for the realpolitik answer. That's pretty obvious. But what is the legal and institutional answer to this question?"

It made me think of a different, more prevalent, example: free trade versus dumping subsidised goods on markets that have been jimmied open by the IMF. As Bill Quigley says, Haiti used to be able to feed itself. Then there was the IMF, then there was cheap government-supported US rice. Haitian farmers, unable to compete, went to the wall and ended up in the city.

This is a pattern repeated over the world: the film Life and Debt brilliantly shows real lives in Jamaica changed by these forces. I recall the vivid image of milk being poured down the drain - again, subsidised imports made it unsellable.

So, like Maria, the realpolitik seems obvious - but I don't find it so. It's clear enough who has power, and who is going to get screwed when the barter system of trade rounds starts up again. My favourite trade round story is about 'implementation issues'. Previous agreements included things that should have benefited the Global South - but rich countries used a cunning tactic called 'not doing it'. (Later, in fact, some did the reverse, as with the US Farm Bill, scuppering any global agreement among rich countries to reduce subsidies: how is the EU supposed to convince farmers here of the necessity of reducing them if the US is going the other way?) In the first Doha Round, developing countries pointed out over a hundred of these 'implementation issues'. The result? This batch of already-agreed items got their own negotiation process. So developing countries found themselves having to go through all the usual barter and compromise for things already agreed beforehand. Bear in mind that (for example) at the Doha Round, G7 countries had more than twice as many delegates as the 39 least developed countries: they were in no position to be spending more energy on a second teir, defending agreements they should by rights have already seen the fruit of.

So it's a joke: manifestly, clearly wrong, and entirely visible to all. Its mathematically obvious why dumped goods fuck a country up, and in the real world we've seen it happen over and over - but nothing happens. Everyone still talks as though freeing trade is the best thing - 'oh, but, really, if it's to be fair, the West should stop dumping.' It hasn't and it won't: this is the one fact that needs policy built around it. It can't just be assumed away as though somewhere down the road it's going to magically turn to mist.

I guess my answer to the original question would be: what's the legal / institutional answer? There's no mechanism whatsoever to transmit the damage done by stupid trade agreements. There's the institutional fora - where the Global South has little power. (And when it clubs together and does fight, the trade round goes tits up, thus proving all the Realists right - trade institutions work only when the powerful get more than they face losing.) And there are concerned rich country groups who can lobby and help keep things in the news. But there's no real... what's the word? D... D...

p.s. It's scandalous not writing more blog entries. If Dani Rodrik can manage to post regularly, I have no excuse...