Stop racing to the bottom.

• Position: Comment

The regime of corporate free trade is finally facing a serious challenge. Looking back, the Zapatista revolt marked the first assault. The ragtag peasant army rose up in the jungles of Mexico on January 1, 1994, the date the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. Among other things, the Zapatistas warned that NAFTA would throw poor Mexican farmers off their lands. The Zapatistas were right. One million Mexican peasant farmers lost their livelihoods. NAFTA allowed U.S. agribusiness companies to swamp Mexico with cheap corn, thus making it all but impossible for peasant farmers to eke out a living.

Then the Battle of Seattle in the fall of 1999 showed the whole world that corporate-dominated governments would no longer be able to set the terms of trade in secret or without a fight. Farmers, unionists, environmentalists, food activists, and human rights defenders insisted on making their views known. Ever since then, corporate free traders have faced organized popular resistance whenever and wherever they have met.

In Cancun in September, the WTO meeting fell apart because this resistance movement emboldened Third World governments to stand up to the bullies in Washington and London and Paris. With U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick in the lead, the industrial powers wanted to force developing countries to throw their economies open even more to foreign banks and corporations, while the United States, Britain, and France continued to subsidize their own farmers, who export corn, wheat, soybeans, and cotton at below market rates. In the United States, these subsidies mostly go to giant agribusiness companies, not small farmers.

But the problems with the WTO--indeed, the problems with corporate free trade---extend far beyond the double standards of the powerful. The heart of the issue is whether such trade works for people. We are convinced it does not. NAFTA and the WTO put the right of multinational corporations to trade freely above all other rights and values, including protecting the environment, food safety, and public services, insisting on human rights, and guaranteeing workers the right to organize and to earn a living wage.

Without these protections, corporations simply play one country off against another in an endless search for cheaper wages and fewer regulations.

In Cancun, the nations of the Global South fought back. Forming themselves into the so-called Group of 21, these nations--with Brazil in the...