ABSTRACT
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is a global, free-trade-treaty organization which, by excluding concern for humans and animals as the basis of trade and commerce, has, in effect, outlawed human rights and animal rights from commercial activity. Despite free trade being increasingly justified as in the interest of the people of the developing world, WTO rules make the poor in developing countries pay the most because they make them bear a disproportionate burden of the social and ecological costs of globalization. The Indian government’s new economic policy of 1991 was based on trade liberalization and it encouraged the setting up of 100 per cent export-oriented meat plants. The WTO ruling in the shrimp-turtle dispute – over how shrimp are caught – has protected the worldwide diffusion of non-sustainable industrial fishing technologies such as trawlers to meet the non-sustainable luxury demands of rich consumers in the North.
