Free Trade, Fair Trade, and Selective Enforcement

摘要

The question of what a fair-trade policy should look like-what noncommercial values trade law should protect and how it should do so-is currently on the table, and addressing the market distortions that selective enforcement creates must be part of the answer. Free trade agreements are supposed to open markets to competition. The great irony is that the process through which these rules are enforced can have the opposite effect. While substantive trade rules promote competition, government enforcement policies curtail it. Worse, they do so precisely for those products that have the largest social benefits-environmentally sustainable products that could reduce the burden imposed by natural resource-intensive industries. Governments should ultimately look at ways to make enforcement more even-handed across products that compete with each other-like fossil fuels and renewable energy, or wild caught fish and farmed fish. A global trade prosecutor may not be in governments' interests today, but a multilateral process to coordinate enforcement actions would go a long way towards rebuilding the trade regime's legitimacy. As Hunter S. Thompson once said, "We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws."