Word: trading
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...then, in 1991, trade came crashing in. Mexico brought an action against the U.S. under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the WTO's predecessor). It claimed that American environmental law prohibiting the import of tuna from countries that killed too many dolphins violated international trade rules. And Mexico won. All those hours environmentalists had spent trudging through the corridors of Capitol Hill on behalf of dolphins had been undermined, overnight, by a far-off tribunal...
...Investment, which would prevent countries from favoring domestic companies over foreign ones and allow businesses to sue governments that they felt violated their rights as investors. And the man the environmentalists were railing against was one of the pact's chief proponents, Renato Ruggiero, head of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the body that oversees the global trading system...
...that deadline, in no small part because of the kind of activism on display in San Jose. The charge that the MAI would eviscerate national environmental protections has turned a technical economic agreement into a cause celebre. And that says a lot about the way the debate over free trade has transformed the American environmental movement...
...decade ago, most environmentalists were happily oblivious to the mind-numbing negotiations between international bureaucrats seeking to open the world's markets. Not a single staff member at any of America's major environmental organizations worked primarily on trade. For groups like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation and Defenders of Wildlife, the environmental battle was fought, as it had been for years, primarily in Congress...
Those obscure, distant bureaucrats had developed a set of principles that struck at the heart of the environmental movement. According to the GATT (and later the WTO), free trade meant that a country's laws might favor one kind of product over another but should generally not discriminate between two identical products just because they were made differently. The tuna exported by Mexico wasn't any different from the tuna caught by other countries: the fact that more dolphins died in the process was simply a different way of making the same product. For environmentalists, the threat was clear...