Norberg: The further you get from the West, the more positive people are toward globalization, toward more business and trade ties with the rest of the world. The most vocal opponents of globalization in poor countries are often funded by critics from wealthier countries. For instance, Vandana Shiva [director of the New Delhi-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology] is a very vocal opponent of economic liberalization and biotechnology, and she's funded by a lot of different Western groups. Actual farmers in the developing world mostly would like these new crops to actually get something done.
There are the old groups that have always been scared of foreign competition. Corporations that wouldn't be able to beat competition from other countries are one of them. In the U.S., that includes the textile industry, which has funded a lot of the anti-sweatshop propaganda. You see the same thing when it comes to unions that are trying to educate people against free trade, trying to block the NAFTA agreements, the World Trade Organization negotiations, and similar things. But there are newer pressure groups too. These include nongovernmental organizations that have been mostly interested in domestic issues, which could be anything from workplace safety to opposing privatization and outsourcing. In a globalized world, it makes sense for these groups to make their case in front of international bodies. Probably more than most, environmental groups understood that they have an interest in challenging the new globalization forces. They are used to being able to lobby their own governments to stop certain substances, to stop genetically modified crops and the like. They understand that they have to take their issues to the WTO and to be able to fight for them there.
All these groups may have different agendas -- the unions are interested in domestic jobs and the greens in air quality -- but they're willing to collaborate. They don't have the same views, and they don't have the same goals. But they do have the same enemy.
Reason: Let's talk about the environmental groups a bit. In your book, you convincingly demonstrate that economic development is a boon to the environment because richer countries tend to pollute less. You point to research suggesting that economic growth correlates positively with cleaner air and water once countries reach around $10,000 per capita GDP -- the level of South Korea, Argentina, and Slovenia. You argue that best way to clean the environment is to get the developing world to move as quickly as possible from a pre-industrial to a post-industrial economy. Why would environmental groups not buy that argument?
Norberg: I think that there are two basic reasons that lead environmentalists to oppose globalization and the industrial development that goes along with it. The first is a real concern about the environment. Many environmentalists care about green forests, clean air, clean water, and so on. What they don't appreciate is that attitude is itself a result of industrial development. In our countries, people didn't care about these things 100 years ago. Preferences shift when you can feed your children and give them an education. That's when you begin to care about these sorts of things. Environmentalists in this camp merely project a contemporary sense of these issues onto developing countries that are at the place where the West was a century ago. It's an intellectually honest mistake, one that new information and data can change. So can talking with people in developing countries.
But there's another motivation at work among some environmentalists. I don't think this viewpoint represents the majority, but it often includes the intellectual leaders of environmental groups. These are people who are bothered not by environmental degradation per se. Rather, they reject the modern project altogether. They are skeptical of the lifestyles and societies that we have created. They think we are alienated from nature compared to the past and that it is wrong to see nature as a tool that human beings can use for their own convenience and benefit. It's a fundamentally aesthetic understanding of the world that is reminiscent of early 19th century German romanticism. It paints a very distorted view of the pre-industrial world as a utopia. In reality, that world was a place in which starvation was the rule and not the exception.
I was extremely skeptical towards modern industrial society for a long time, so I understand these sentiments. If you live in an urban, developed area and your main experience of rural areas is secondhand, they're quite understandable. You feel very sad about countries that are modernizing and building factories, and about people who will be buying espresso machines that make loud noises instead of, I don't know, sitting around listening to the birds singing.
My attitude changed as I began to read history and understood what kind of circumstances my ancestors lived in. The world they lived in was far from ideal. It was starvation, it was children dying in the first year of their lives. And of course, backbreaking labor, including child labor, was everywhere. I think the best way to rebut this romantic, aesthetic challenge to globalization, to our modern project, is by actually looking at the circumstances of pre-industrial society.
Reason: In your book, you really lay into Western governments, many of which talk out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to liberalizing trade. They want unfettered access to new markets, but they routinely employ protectionist tariffs against developing countries. You call this "the white man's shame" and point out that "Western duties on export commodities from the developing world are 30 percent above the global average."
Norberg: Since the end of the Second World War, we've liberalized trade in most areas. Ironically, the main places where we haven't done so are textiles and agriculture -- the two very areas where poor countries can compete.
In the developed world, the textile and agricultural sectors are very strong special interest groups with a lot of political resources. They can make a lot of noise in the public debate. We know that if we open these markets to competition, we'll have to restructure those parts of our economies. People will have to change jobs and go into something else. That would be painful, of course, but it's outrageous, since those are precisely where poor countries would be able to do well.
Reason: This opens up a larger question about increasing globalization. If trade laws come down to special interest politics, how do you defeat those interests? How do we get to a point where the U.S. and the European Union finally gives up on protectionism for textiles and agriculture?
Norberg: I think the first thing that is necessary is moral outrage. We need to explain what's on the line, what the cost is to poor people in the least developed countries. People are dying because we in the West are unwilling to change and to actually live by the free market rhetoric we often spout. We also have to explain to the public that it's not merely developing countries that lose out by these policies. We do too.
Reason: How do we lose out?
Norberg: We deny ourselves access to better goods at cheaper prices from other countries. We lose out because we have to pay billions in tax-funded subsidies to these special interest groups so that they don't have to face competition. Agricultural subsidies cost something on the order of $1 billion a day in Western countries. We have to explain to people, "Look, if we have real free trade, we'll make another $1 billion every day, simply because we abolished our agricultural subsidies." One study I cite in the book estimates that the world would gain about $70 billion annually from a 40 percent tariff reduction on manufactures -- and that 75 percent of that gain would go to developing nations.
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