Critics of Trade on Left Question Green Trade
The Institute for Policy Studies, a nonprofit critic of globalization, war, and human rights abuses around the globe, hosted an event that questioned the ability of trade to help advance the green transition needed to prevent uncontrolled global warming.
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Karen Hansen-Kuhn, who works at the group's division for agriculture and trade policy, said the carbon border adjustment mechanism moving through the legislative process in the EU sounds like it would tackle emissions created when natural gas is used to make fertilizer.
"I would say it’s not a great solution," she said, because it continues an agribusiness approach that is dependent on chemical fertilizers. She said fertilizers have been overused because they've been so cheap, and said so much nitrogen fertilizer is applied in China and India that the plants can't absorb it all. The same practices exist to a lesser extent, in Mexico, the U.S. and Brazil, she said.
She said on the Dec. 16 webinar that farmers need to reduce the need for fertilizer by crop rotation, composting and nitrogen-fixing cover crops.
Luciana Ghiotto, who works for a sister nonprofit called the Transnational Institute in Argentina, said advocates need to understand how the system of liberalizing trade "is evolving in order to fight against it." She asked, "Are we winning, or are we losing?" She said advocates need to press governments to change their positions in free trade negotiations, such as opposing investor-state dispute settlement. She said globalization has been a "highly destructive model of capitalist development."
The moderator asked if the Inflation Reduction Act's subsidies that give preferences to North America are a development that signifies a turning away from globalization. Manuel Perez Rocha, an associate fellow at both institutes, responded through a translator, saying he's concerned that the IRA promotes mining of critical minerals.
"There's a lot of concern among Native populations in the United States and Canada and the rest of the world," he said, that these mines will pollute their lands.
"And so the great question is: environment? And the solution is a different model of consumption," he said, a philosophy he called degrowth. "The solution is not electric vehicles, but rather public transportation, etc."