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What's
most perplexing about global trade is that its implications for the environment
confront decisionmakers with vexing contradictions and tradeoffs at every
turn. The growing mobility of capital through such inventions as the "maquiladoras"
free trade zone on the U.S.-Mexican border, for example, undermines environmental
standards by allowing polluting industries to escape enforcement rather
than clean up their act; yet the same mobility of investment also gives
poor countries greater revenue to invest in cleaner industries themselves.
Freer trade might cause rainforest to be cleared for cash crops; yet by
reducing tariffs on processed goods sold abroad, it might also enable
developing countries to move beyond heavy dependece on extractive industries
such as tropical forest logging and mining. As a result of these conundrums,
the debate over trade and the environment has become a political minefield
that reaches into virtually every country, industry, and ecosystem. It
will sorely test the ability of governments to meet the demands of a word
in which "instability" is no longer just a political condition
but a biological one.
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