How World Trade Organization Law Affects Alcohol and Public Health - Essay Example

Whereas it is most certainly the case that the global system cannot merely be divided based upon rich and powerful and/or poor and weak, the preceding analysis will engage the reader based upon this differential and the means by which rich nations benefit and exploit poor ones via the mechanisms and power of such entities as the WTO.

Taking the case of Zimbabwe as a case in point, one can see how the WTO seeks to exploit this resource-rich area of the globe for its mineral wealth while at the same time rejecting the market value of finished goods or food that Zimbabwe is capable of producing (Baumberg & Anderson, 2008).  As such, the relationship is only a one-way relationship in which Zimbabwe, and many nations like it, are forced to sell their products at lower prices to the richer members of the WTO.  Further, even the goods that might exist to be traded on the global market are disproportionately priced and locked out of key global markets as a result of the actions that entities such as the WTO engage. Yes, it must not be the understanding of the reader that such a situation of raw material extraction and price setting is somehow unique with regard to sub-Saharan Africa. Instead, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that developed nations around the globe utilize price setting and currency wars, as well as product dumping, to ensure that this particular approach to global supremacy and economic power is maintained at a systemic level.

Further, taking the example of Burma, a nation that has only recently stepped out of military dictatorship, it can be understood that the WTO also seeks to take advantage of this nation; not only with respect to its surplus of cheap labor but with regards to its agricultural exports.  As a direct result of the combined benefit of preferential trade, WTO member nations, specifically, the wealthy ones, are able to pay their own farmers a subsidy in order that they might be able to compete with the low-cost exports of nations such as Burma.  In such a manner, entities such as the WTO are able to exploit poorer/less developed nations by forcing them to sell the products that are desired at a given price as well as ensuring that they are not able to grow their own domestic economy by subsidizing any industry or agricultural sector that runs the risk of being overtaken by the cheap exports that such a nation might provide to the market (Williams, 2001).  One need look no further than the way in which heavy levels of subsidies exist throughout Western Europe and the United States in order to understand the way in which offenses maneuvers are continually engaged to ensure that the third world is unable to compete with the first.

As such, the takeaway understanding that can be provided from this brief analysis is the fact that the WTO is ultimately like any other organization is made up of a large number of stakeholders (Antell & Coleman, 2011). Rather than determining that the WTO is brought to human ethics and should be dissolved immediately and forthwith, the more reasonable and rational understanding that should be engaged in the fact that a disproportionate level of power and determinacy is given to those nations that hold the wealth throughout the global system; enabling them to take advantage of the poorer nations and set prices rather than engaging in a level of true economic freedom and cooperation. Ironically, this level of freedom and economic cooperation is the cornerstone upon which the WTO was originally founded. However, as can be seen from the preceding cases that have been discussed, this particular entity has strayed far from this particular approach and instead seeks ways to infringe global power and dynamics and create a status quo that is inalterable and inescapable for the poorest nations throughout the globe that continually seek a means of self determinacy and growth based upon the same models that the wealthier nations who impose such a system have been able to grow themselves.