By: Gregor Shovlin

Quick. Think of the poorest countries in the world. What came to mind? Somewhere in West Africa? Southeast Asia? Or closer to home, in Central and South America? These places may seem like they are vastly different, but they all have reasons why you will subconsciously associate them with poverty and economic despair. However, you may ask “What connects India to Indonesia to Iberian America?” The answer is: the interconnected global market and America’s outsized influence in said market.

In middle and high school history classes, you probably learned all sorts of important dates, like September 22, 1862, October 29, 1929, and December 7, 1941. But you probably never learned about the earth-shattering invention deployed on April 26, 1956. It was not an upgraded atomic bomb, a new jet fighter, or some piece of foundational space-race technology. It was something innocuous to us today, but revolutionary at the time: the standardized, rectangular shipping container. At risk of sounding dramatic, this small piece of technology allowed America to take the reins of the world’s economy and unilaterally forge a new global interconnectedness. Today, it doesn’t seem as earth-shattering. After all, they’ve been adopted by nearly every shipping firm - a testament to their disruptive potential.

To ship ocean freight before the invention of this container, you had to have longshoremen slowly and deliberately pack everything into the hull of a ship, as opposed to standardized containers that could be stacked easily, drastically reducing loading times. It used to cost $5.38 per ton in 1950’s dollars to load a ship. After the widespread adoption of this container, it only cost $0.16. (1) This made two things apparent: One, that the new global market stood on different rules: efficiency, innovation, and competitive labor costs. This stood in stark opposition to the old ways of empires,mercantile systems of banning international trade and taking over land to extract more wealth. Second, that entire industries could and would be destroyed through said innovation. However, most nations decided to follow this doctrine, so long as it worked to their benefit.

Sadly, it hasn’t been working for America as of late. America often refuses to play by the rules of the market they created when it starts to lose industries seen as key to the economy or larger American cultural identity. It wouldn’t take you long to find an example: steel, automobiles, textiles, and consumer goods ranging from TVs to car floor mats; essentially, any industrial pursuit that couldn’t be automated or depended on unskilled labor was seen as exempt from these rules. America is incredibly protective of such industries, going so far as to put tariffs on foreign competitors to keep its heavy industry and consumer goods competitive. There is a reason that many people outside of (and increasingly, inside) Michigan will drive a Toyota, Nissan, or Honda, instead of a Chevy, Ford, or Jeep. The simple reason is that American-made automobiles cannot compete with the multitude of cost-reducing production techniques that made the Japanese industry so internationally famous. It has become impossible to bridge this gap even with government protections, causing American car companies to shift to SUV and truck platforms, as the Koreans, Japanese, Germans, etc. cannot compete due to a lack of domestic demand for these larger and less efficient vehicles.

However, America’s domestic economic policy has turned out worse for other countries. In West African countries, such as Mali, the cotton industry was a key job creator. Mali is Africa’s largest cotton producer, and is part of a group called the C-4 countries (a bloc of west African cotton producing countries including Chad, Burkina Faso, and Benin). By 2003, cotton was Mali’s second largest exported crop. (2) It represented around 10% of its GDP and constituted around ⅓ of its export totals, according to OEC reports. (3) The United States also has a cotton industry. This industry generates around $25 billion, is .00125% of total GDP, and employs around 200,000 people in total. Unfortunately for the United States (and Europe), Brazil also has a cotton industry. They are the world’s fourth largest producer and second largest exporter. (4) America subsidized its cotton industry with a $12 billion cash injection between 1999 and 2002, (5) and American farmers sold their product at lower prices. Yet, it somehow came as a shock to American officials when they were summoned to the WTO to face arbitration by Brazil and the C-4 countries. The Brazilian and Malian representatives to the WTO claimed that this constituted uncompetitive behavior, and caused them to suffer greatly due to cotton making up a much larger proportion of their exports.(6) They sent their case to the WTO for arbitration. This was seen as so egregious, that the United States was actually punished for its subsidies (the first time ever they had been punished for this) and forced to capitulate to Brazilian demands and settle. Later in 2010, the Brazilian representatives claimed that they could disregard American IP and patents to make up for lost profits and exports, causing America to promise to address these issues in the 2012 Farm Bill. (7)

Many people probably know the term “Latin American” or the identifier “Latino”, but may be confused as to why such a large bloc of nations and people groups use this as a sort of catch-all. If you ask a political scientist or an expert in international relations, they will probably tell you it is because of the United States. Because of the United States’ actions, detailed in their own documents declassified and handed over to courts by the Obama administration, (8) thousands of Argentine families have no idea where their sons disappeared during the 1970’s. Argentina’s “Dirty War” under Jorge Rafael Videla and its subsequent junta dictatorship is possibly the most widely hated government in the country’s history. They engaged in a brutal suppression of dissent, and anything seen as “subversive”. This was justified as necessary to stop the spread of communism. Our western opinion of this is often skewed. Many peers have often said “Why do the Argentines still distrust us? There’s been several decades of different American administrations since then!” Well, let me ask you a question. If your son was one day scooped up off the street on his way to university, black-bagged and sent to a detention site, tortured to death, and then uncerimoniously thrown into a mass grave or in the ocean to hide the evidence, (9)(10)(11) would you be quick to forgive? Would you forgive the foreign superpower who administered this as part of some abstract idea of “stopping communism”? Could you ever forgive if this was your son, who you never could see again, who you couldn’t even bury, who the government couldn’t even find a trace of to this day? Most of all, could you forgive if your son was taken from you for the ‘crime’ of simply having different political beliefs? The United States has a great deal of blood on its hands. This is not to forget the complete and utter collapse of inefficient Mexican industry following NAFTA, (12) which wouldn’t have happened if the extremely well-educated American officials had not let post-Cold War hubris blind them to these facts. There is a reason that Mexico’s communal farms collapsed (13) as mechanized American agriculture stormed in to try and recreate America’s export agriculture industry in Mexico, causing many thousands to lose their jobs to machines. There is also a reason this led to a violent, spontaneous uprising of indigenous militias in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. (14) Many of you may not even know of the Zapatistas, named after the man martyred by an oppressive government during the Mexican Revolution. You may also not know that their movement has a great deal of steam. To you, they may be dangerous radicals. Or you may agree with them. But that in and of itself is a flawed way to think about this. To the average indigenous Southern Mexican, they are freedom fighters in a struggle for survival against an American sphere of influence seen as oppressive and exploitative. And we need not even talk about the IMF loans to these Latin American countries, which caused their own subsequent economic troubles, as the damage has already been done.

America is not just a captain of industry, it is a titan of industry, even in these days of outsourcing and new global markets opening. But America cannot afford to lumber around and stomp all over others. When it deals with the world, it has to be precise and deliberate. No more hubris. No more half-baked policy suggestions cooked up by technocrats or politicians looking for cheap re-election material. You need not be an international relations expert to know the complete and utter devastation dealt to regions of Mexico as part of the War On Drugs. When America deals with the rest of the world, we cannot be handing down mandates as if we were an emperor to others in our reach, but it needs to be co-operative. It needs to be nuanced. And if we proceed in this fashion, it may be unpopular but our elected officials need to understand and accept that. America has great power, but it got that power through trade, innovation, and efficiency. We are not the only country nor the only people capable of gaining such prosperity through these means; such bounty deserves to be afforded to all. When things go right, you get a country like Uruguay or Chile, developed and leaders of human rights and prosperity in Latin America. There is no reason why we cannot do better. In fact, I argue that given the previously mentioned prosperity, we are obligated to do better and lift others up to our standard of living. And most of all, there is no reason why you cannot be an agent of that change. So I challenge you to get out and do just that.

Sources:

Further Reading:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMXXJqvMdk4&t=3877s&ab_channel=YaleUniversity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVWHuJOmaEk

https://netimpact.org/careers/international-development/big-picture