Abstract

Free Trade and the `Starving Child' Defense: A Forum

This article presents a discussion related to starvation and free trade. Ajit Singh, who graduated from Punjab University and obtained his PhD at the University of California, says that academic and non-academic big guns have been wheeled out to suggest that economic globalization, which essentially means free trade and unfettered capital movements, is the only way of achieving fast material progress. Dennis Brutus, who is a South African poet and activist who speaks frequently on debt and development issues says that if people look at the agenda of the WTO in Seattle and what it was hoping to accomplish, it was really an expansion of its current program, penetration of the developing nations, further expansion of corporate power there and continued and accelerated exploitation of those regions.