The Wake

When purchasing a sweatshirt or a pair of jeans, the majority of us completely ignore the “made in” label. What concerns us at the shopping mall is whether or not the article of clothing is flattering or comfortable, but the many people who worked to make the clothing rarely, if ever, cross our minds.

It may seem surprising, then, that the trade of textiles and apparel is one of the most highly contested issues in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Many developing nations are dependent on the export of textiles to fuel their economies.

According to the WTO’s Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC), international textiles and clothing trade has also just recently gone through a fundamental, perhaps even radical, change. Before the agreement took effect, quotas controlled a large portion of such trade. Under the agreement, WTO members committed themselves to removing the quotas and to integrating fully into GATT rules by January of last year.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is an agreement signed in 1947, whose purpose was to promote global trade between members through a reduction in tariffs and a general liberalization of international trade (the formation of GATT—and its subsequent amendments up to 1994—laid the framework for the creation of the WTO in 1995).

According to the WTO, textiles and clothing account for about 9.1 percent of world manufactured goods exports or 6.5 percent of all merchandise exports. According to an estimate in 1994 by what was then the GATT Secretariat, the removal of quotas and a reduction in tariffs could add 18 percent to the value of trade in textiles excluding clothing by 2005. According to the WTO, its plans for liberalization would increase the value of clothing trade by as much as 69 percent. This has been used by the WTO to estimate a 14 to 37 percent expansion in exports calculated to accumulate in “developing and transitional economy” countries as a result of the change in these trade policies.

But what do these massive, “global” statements and concepts really mean? How can we understand the effects and repercussions of the policies of the global trade regime on a local level?

Ph.D. candidate Marion Traub-Werner is addressing such questions in her dissertation project, which “explores the interaction between global trade policy, development paradigms and social movement organizing through the lens of the export apparel industry in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.” In the first of the Latin American Lunch Talks put on by the Institute of Global Studies on Feb. 2, Traub-Werner discussed research strategies for her project, entitled “Displacing Free Trade: Studying forms of friction in the Caribbean export apparel trade.”

In the lead up to the WTO’s global liberalization of the apparel industry in 2005, the International Finance Corporation (or the IFC, a part of the World Bank) financed the largest apparel company, which is also the country’s largest private employer, in the Dominican Republic to establish a trade zone on the border with Haiti in 2002. Despite relatively easy physical passage across it, the DR-Haiti border is a deep one, fraught with memories and persistence of racism, nationalism, and economic exploitation. The two countries have a violent, turbulent history that has left its mark everywhere. Indeed, Massacre River runs through the new free trade zone.

While the development of this new zone may help the Dominican Republic hold on to textile manufacturing jobs that it was expected to lose due to global liberalization at a great cost to its economy (50 percent of Dominican exports are apparel, according to Traub-Werner), its cultural and other implications are unknown. It is situated on the border, but the majority of land is Haitian farmland while a Dominican company rules the zone. The farmers were able to organize and make demands when their land was used for the creation of the zone.

The IFC has called the money used for the project the “Hispaniola fund,” using the name that Columbus gave to the island when he discovered it. “The idea of one island is being resurrected,” says Traub-Werner, who plans to study the effects of global trade decisions on a local level, in this unique historical space.