WTO is not Chimera

"Great ideas often receives violent opposition from mediocre minds." As said by Albert Einstein,

For the past couple of years the WTO and related organizations, the World Bank and IMF, have suffered a lot of bad press because of the antics of a bunch of middle-class yobs with nothing better to do than fly around the world to have the occasional riot. These "protesters" claim that the WTO and World Bank are dreadful organizations because they tell poor countries what to do, encourage pollution and sundry other lies and half truths. The protesters (a rag tag bunch of bored lazy youths and died in the wool old trade-unionists) tend to oppose free trade because half of them think that their own industries need to be protected and the other half because they think that free trade will somehow lead to "exploitation". This is of course pure garbage.

Free trade is a good thing. In fact it is just about one of the best ideas ever. If total free trade were introduced, which is the ultimate aim of the WTO then humanity as a whole would benefit. At the moment the unnatural market structures created by trade tariffs result in third world countries which could easily produce food for themselves, being forced to grow cash crops, because they can't export food. Since these countries tend to have inefficient, corrupt or socialist (or all three) regimes, they over-produce the cash crop and don't produce enough food. The end result of this, is of course that food in our shops is over-priced too. The current world economy is filled with similar examples.

The WTO is doing good for all of us (in fact particularly for the poorer countries) by seeking to eliminate barriers to trade which impoverish everyone except the vested interests (eg Trade Unions or French Farmers) who benefit from the current system. The real scandal, the one that the protesters would be up in arms about if they engaged their brains before opening their mouths is that in the modern, prosperous world (there are apparently now more obese people than starving people in the world today) where there is plenty of food for everyone many people are still without food and water. The main reason for this is because they have the misfortune to live in the aforementioned badly runs countries.

The World Bank and IMF are often criticized at this point in the argument for failing to improve matters, and indeed their are a huge number of criticisms that can be levied at those two bodies. However, the only criticisms which carry any weight are that those organizations have spent the last 50 years doling out money to dodgy regimes, and have been useless at preventing fraud and defaulting. If they were run like private companies or real banks, rather than international quangoes dominated by the concept of "buggins turn" ('the last chairman was a German, so this year we have to appoint a Frenchman'). These bodies have been incompetent, and have failed the world's poor by allowing their leaders to get away with criminal behavior.
If the World Bank and IMF had behaved like the marauding ruthless capitalists the Seattle rioters like to pretend they are, the world would be a better place for it, and the poor nations of the world would be less in debt. The World Bank and IMF are being reformed to make them more efficient but the jury is still out on whether the reforms will work. In the meantime we should support the WTO since it is doing far more for the world's poor than any other organization in history - by offering them the chance to sell to everyone on earth, without the current restrictions.
George Bernard Shaw said, "We are made wise not by collection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."