Ideas for Change: Replace Free Trade With Fair Trade
Published January 12, 2009 @ 08:31AM PT
On Change.org' Stop Global Warming blog, Emily is inviting finalists with ideas relevant to stopping global warming in the Ideas for Change in America competition to talk about their idea more. She reached out to Keith Rouda, author of the Replace Free Trade with Fair Trade idea to explain his idea.
Unrestrained competition puts the producer's focus 100% on providing the best product for their market at the best price. In a purely competitive environment any dilution of this focus risks failure. We learned long ago in the United States that this focus MUST be extended for competition and capitalism to work. The only way to allow companies to do this is to make all of them extend in the same way. This keeps the playing field level and allows producers to continue to compete successfully.
The only way to ensure that companies (and nations as a whole) can afford to divert competitive energy and resources to concerns such as child labor, environmental protection, global warming, worker safety, and other broad societal imperatives is to remove them as competitive factors. These concerns can be removed as competitive factors by using tariffs to ensure that no companies or nations with lower mandated requirements benefit economically by doing so.
Read the rest of Keith words as well as Emily's words on stopping global warming.
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Author
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Zarah is the Operations Manager for the Global Exchange Fair Trade Online Store, a project of the international human rights organization, Global Exchange. Alongside her work with marginalized communities from all over the world to get their products into the international market, Zarah serves to educate and inform the public about a more just and sustainable trading system.
