Scholars talk about NAFTA

"NAFTA and Beyond," a conference sponsored by University programs ranging from the Center for Migration and Development to the Center for Human Values, highlighted the impact of free trade on the developing world in discussions this weekend.

Lectures and papers were generally focused on ways to fine-tune the North American Free Trade Agreement 11 years after its implementation.

"We wanted to bring together a group of acclaimed sociologists, economists, and anthropologists to discuss these topics of globalization," said sociology professor Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, who helped to organize the conference.

Of the 23 speakers at the conference, 15 came from other universities, including some in Ecuador and Mexico, according to Nancy Doolan, who administers the Center for Migration and Development.

Conference participants said an international and interdisciplinary approach to the study of globalization was important.

"They have brought together such a diversity of people," said Gary Gereffi, a globalization scholar at Duke University who spoke at the conference. "That's key. Since globalization issues breach nearly every field, our departments tend to be segmented without a conference like this."

In a speech broadly critical of neoliberal economic policies, Harvard professor Dani Rodrik opened the conference by proposing "ten reforms to make the world more conductive to development," including breaking up the "World Bank monopoly" into several competing agencies and mandating a "development impact statement" for international trade agreements.

The rest of the conference consisted of five sessions in which presenters spoke to a panel of guest scholars. Selected respondents on the panel gave their reactions before the sessions moved into an open discussion.

"The purpose was to present the topic material in a variety of disciplines and promote an academic dialogue between the most important scholars in these fields" Fernandez-Kelly said.

Presentations included a paper on the "colonizing influence" of free trade agreements on Latin America, by Catherine Walsh of the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Ecuador, and a paper on collective action by female workers in India by Princeton graduate student Rina Agarwala.

Jon Shefner, another conference organizer who directs the Interdisciplinary Program in Global Studies at the University of Tennessee, deemed the conference a success.

"Patricia and I had a meeting in May where we composed a 'Dream Team' list of guests for this event," Shenfer said. "We thought it would be great if we could get half or even one-third of them to attend, but we have collected about 95 percent."

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Doolan predicted that there will be similar conferences in the future. "Our goal is to make it annual," she said.

She and Fernandez-Kelly plan to publish a collection of the conference presentations sometime next year.

"It is a testament to the power of Princeton University and great integrity of the subject that nearly everyone we invited accepted the invitation," Fernandez-Kelly said.